Solving product profitability challenges for Bosch
Summary
Bosch is a German multinational engineering and technology company specializing in mobility, consumer goods, industrial technology and energy building technology. Bosch’s automotive aftermarket sales division needed to understand how profitable their products were for its American business customers.
Opportunity
Bosch saw an advantage in leveraging the power of predictive analytics and geodata visualization to expand and improve their existing data analytical tools. They also wanted to demonstrate the improvements that this could provide for sales performance but needed additional resources with expertise in advanced techniques.
Solution
Bosch connected with DePaul Innovation Development Laboratory (iD Lab) over this opportunity space to discuss potential solutions. We suggested a data-driven approach to create an MVP application for their purposes. We created datasets for Bosch products that could be examined by time and geography. Then, we used predictive analytics modelling to analyze historical data and provide future projections. Finally, we designed a unique and interactive map-based interface that provided enhanced visualizations for quick processing of data on several geographic levels; and an MVP desktop application with fully functional and interactive dashboards which includes visualization, sales forecasts, and reporting.
Impacts
With the solution that iD Lab provided Bosch used the MVP to test their theories on improving regional sales and their ability to make decisions to increase performance. Bosch was able to demonstrate the effectiveness of advanced analytics and visualizations in strengthening their capabilities for automotive aftermarket sales. Based on successful results, Bosch decided to allocate additional resources to the development of the application and move the MVP to production. The desktop application is now in production.