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Helping Your Partners Help Themselves |
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There are a number of great examples of companies using business intelligence and analytics to gain a competitive edge in their respective fields or markets. But what about putting BI to work to help your business partners use less of your products or services?
That seems to be the unlikely approach that rental car giant Enterprise Holdings has used to gain the increased loyalty of its business partners.
The business case is set out as follows. A big portion of Enterprise’s business, which includes its Enterprise, National and Alamo rent-a-car units, comes from the insurance and auto body industry. When people get into a fender bender and need to leave their vehicle for a few days – or weeks – with an auto body shop, their insurance provider often authorizes them to obtain a replacement rental vehicle from a preferred partner.
Enterprise decided it could do its insurance and auto body shop partners a favor by helping them analyze what may be some of the root causes in delays behind getting a vehicle repaired and back on the road. So, it linked its data warehouse – in this case a Teradata data warehouse – with those of its industry partners and began running queries against the collective information. It was then able to provide intelligence gained from those queries back to its partners.
James Vollmer, lead data warehouse architect for Enterprise, says the company was able to tell body shops, for example, that most of their delays were related to the lack of available parts, or due to certain types of repair. It was also able to provide its insurance industry partners with intelligence about how they could reduce the length of time customers required rental vehicles or more accurate estimates of rental periods.
In the end, the insights could potentially save the insurance industry millions in reduced rental periods – and conversely, cost Enterprise millions. So why do it?
The simple answer, says Vollmer, is that the rental car industry is extremely competitive. It doesn’t make sense to compete solely on price. If Enterprise can offer its partners added value – insights that can help them run their businesses better or save money – then it is much more likely to gain their continued loyalty and a bigger piece of their business.
The lesson? Helping your partners improve their bottom line is often the best way to improve your own bottom line.
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