Client Background

Client: A Japanese multinational automobile manufacturer

Industry type: Automotive

Number of employees: 138,000+

Geography: Worldwide

Challenge

Automotive is a competitive industry fraught with unique challenges. In recent years, vehicle sales have stagnated, while new players continue to enter every market increasing competition. An increase in fleet sales and rental businesses have led to greater fleet discounts. In addition, average product life cycles have declined, compelling automakers to boost incentives to clear out end-of-life-cycle vehicles more often. Vehicle incentives usually have a lifecycle of one month. These incentives have to be offered across the entire product mix for every model and option, often covering more than 200+ variants. This means massive changes to the incentive plans and customer offers across marketing channels every month.

The client was managing its vehicle incentives with an inefficient manual system. This led to frequent changes and flow of information across stakeholders with multiple revisions. The stakeholders could not access a single source of truth to get real-time competitive information to take decisions that impacted sales. As a result, sales were slowing down, the competition was offering better rebates, the sales and incentive teams were overworked, and incorrectly published information was posing financial risks.  

The client wanted a digital incentive system that could lessen the load on its sales and incentive teams, and also configure incentives at a dealer level, DMA level, or a Zip code level. The client signed up with the vendor, who was moved out within 6 months as it were not able to deliver on client expectations, and Wipro was brought in to replace the incumbent.

Solution

Wipro custom developed a solution to meet the client’s needs across all incentive phases such as Planning & Costing, Execution, Qualification & Payments, Accounting & Reconciliations, and Analytics and Reporting. The end-to-end solution included blueprinting, design and development, validation, and deployment.

Wipro also developed a Scenario Generator to help the user simulate what-if scenarios for improved decision-making. The solution was integrated with multiple external systems, including finance systems for input data and advertising systems for output data. This system created standardization and simplification across incentive categories and now supports different incentive requirements across brands, but with the same underlying architecture.

Business Impact

This implementation helped the field team access a consolidated view of dealer- /geo-specific incentives in a single window. Better RoI analysis led to smarter and informed business decisions on incentive spend. In addition, standardized workflows with flexibility for brand-specific initiatives reduced the team’s workload.

As a result, the client’s overall incentive spend decreased by ~5% in just 2 years. Targeted incentives also helped them gain market share by 2%.  The go-to-market time for new offers reduced to 3-4 hours from 2-3 days.