How Forest Grove built an end-to-end, automated inventory management solution

The challenge: replace an inefficient, cumbersome, manual two-week process

As Australia’s largest motor dealership group, Automotive Holdings Group (AHG) owns over 180 car and truck franchises and offers a wide range of services including finance, after care, insurance and equipment. The National Trucks Division regularly undertakes analysis to identify opportunities to transfer spare parts between dealerships in order to minimize the write-downs that occur when parts age without being utilized. Historically the analysis was completed on a monthly basis via an inefficient, cumbersome and manual two-week process that originated with CSV extracts. A scalable, flexible, transparent, and easy-to-update solution was needed, which also significantly accelerated the time to insight.

The solution: An end-to-end, automated data science solution

Forest Grove used KNIME to develop an end-to-end automated data wrangling and reporting engine to expand AHG’s capabilities in deep analysis through the process of data extraction, transformation, reporting and visualization. The solution is scalable, flexible and transparent, and can be easily updated to suit changes to the data environment and user requirements. It comprises five components:

1. Automation of data aggregation from the dealer management system
2. Cleansing, blending, and transforming raw data
3. Storage of raw data in a cloud data warehouse
4. Creation and update of warehouse tables for reports
5. Presentation of data in interactive and scheduled dashboards

Results

This solution has vastly expanded AHG’s deep analysis capabilties and represents a major milestone in its journey from descriptive to predictive analytics. By automating the data interpretation process with KNIME, managers are now able to identify potential transfer opportunities in minutes rather than weeks through:

• Single data repository for all reports
• Scheduled data extraction and aggregation process with detailed governance (validation) checks
• Significantly accelerated time to insight with an infrastructure solution that supports deeper analytical dives

Why KNIME?

The open nature of KNIME Analytics Platform made the development, access, and management of the solution much easier as integrations with other technologies were made possible. Specifically Snowflake for cloud-based data storage and PowerBI for the dashboards.

This Success Story is available here as a PDF.