CASE STUDY
Intelligent Cost Takeout
The Client is a national tire and brakes retailer, facing high store repair and maintenance costs after completing several strategic acquisitions. We partnered with the Client to deploy a cloud-based platform to monitor and anticipate cost trends in real time, reducing operational expenses and boosting enterprise performance over the following 12 months.
- USA
- 1B-2B Annual Revenue
- Retail: Automotive
A Call for Change
After the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, US and global monetary policy created an environment of low interest rates and consolidation among industry players. Executives at the Client, a leading tire retailer and automotive service provider, jumped on the opportunity to bring additional brands into their organization. In just eight months, the company closed five major acquisitions. However, this rapid growth came with numerous technical challenges, namely a fragmented data infrastructure and lack of a unified philosophy to transform this information into intelligent action. Through a partnership with our team, the Client's finance and facility management teams gained the ability to proactively cut costs, meet vendors at the negotiating table, and accurately budget for future growth.
"Astral has been a fantastic partner in our efforts to enhance our data & analytics initiatives. The team quickly grasped many of the unique aspects of our business, enabling them to produce value added services after just a short period of time. Smart, fast and collaborative!"
Rick, VP of Analytics
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Personalized Insights Inspired Immediate Action.
Our teams hit the ground running with a rapid prototyping phase, aiming to drive buy-in across the Client's finance function and generate tangible business value quickly to begin socializing the benefits of more advanced analytics. This phase was centered around detecting and addressing anomalous expenses in real time, recommending courses of action to mitigate them.
We began by implementing automated notifications and recommendations to directly address one of the largest financial challenges of this high-growth period: a reactive approach to managing operational expenses that generated unnecessarily high costs.
To this end, we began a series of agile build phases to design insights around anomalous expenses, projected costs, and comparative analysis between actuals and budgeted/forecasted figures. This process was designed to be ultra collaborative, with both teams working side-by-side to build an Insights Hub suited to both strategic goals and operational challenges. Our team worked to ingest, prep, train, and process data to integrate seamlessly with the Client’s existing technology.
A Lasting Impact
This tool was designed to be multifaceted and utilized by numerous stakeholders. As such, the user experience was designed to be flexible as to adapt to everyone's role and thought process. Real-time exception monitoring, multidimensional financial analysis, and the ability to rapidly generate and export key data sets for ad-hoc analysis were all key elements to ensuring the platform generated a rapid ROI.
Moving Forward
We provided documentation and training to support the Client's internal adoption and continued development of insight-generating tools. Our firm also continues to provide strategic guidance and is gearing up to support the client in customer-centric sales and marketing decisions as market needs begin to shift.
127%
3-year ROI from deploying this Insights Hub
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