Customer expectations and experiences shaping TVS Motor Group’s data and analytics efforts

TVS Motor Company is the third largest two-wheeler manufacturer in India. It houses four manufacturing plants, of which three are located in India- Hosur in Tamil Nadu, Mysore in Karnataka and Nalagarh in Himachal Pradesh. And one in Indonesia at Karawang. Today, TVS Group spans across industries like automobile, education, aviation, electronics, textiles, finance, services, logistics, energy, finance, housing, insurance and investment. To put all these operations of the company in full flow requires cutting edge technology. Analytics is an important way to provide the company more visibility internal and external and in depth insight enabling better decision making.

What kind of digital transformation have you brought in your company?
In TVS Motor Company, we leverage digital and social channels in marketing campaigns and engage customers through digital applications. We have recently invested in various startups to accelerate our digital transformation. We are well on our way to digitise various functions to provide a seamless experience to our customers and better efficiencies in our operations.

What are the latest IT endeavours taken up in the past one or two years that have helped the company?
Creating new IT products and strengthening current functionalities are continuous processes in our companies. For example, regular improvements in connecting with our customers through our website and mobile apps have strengthened our engagement with customers.

Executive buy-in is required for any data analytics programs. How have you rallied support from other functions?
TVS Motor has a strong culture of leveraging data for decisions and a result, we have stellar support for data and analytics from our leadership teams. We are guided by customer expectations and experiences in shaping our data and analytics efforts. Our data and analytics teams co-create solutions with digital and IT teams in many of our projects.

What kind of infrastructure is built for analytics?
We have embarked on creating a modern, scalable and modular infrastructure for analytics in our companies. We are creating feature libraries informed by domain expertise and experimentation. We leverage both best-of-breed and open source MIS applications for specific needs.

Data integrity is a primary requirement for analytics. What steps have you taken for having accurate data?
We have conducted thorough analysis of data management and governance in our companies. That has helped us identify areas of strength and domains that need to be strengthened to leverage the power of analytics in data based decisions. Our companies have specialised in total quality management (TQM) in detecting errors, continuously improving process quality and streamlining supply chain management.

What initiatives have you taken in the space of analytics in your organisation?
Application of analytics in our companies are informed by the type of decisions and depth of data available to make these decisions. Our approach is to have a mix of decision support systems
and decision engines that make the best data based decisioning infrastructure
for each of our functions.

What is the composition of your analytics team and how are you getting the best talent from the market since there is a paucity of talent in this space in India?
We are building our data and analytics capabilities and teams through several approaches. We are hiring specialists laterally as well as grooming internal talent. We are also tapping into the strong engineering skills, domain expertise and TQM driven statistical knowledge of various teams to groom people within the organisation.

What is the analytics roadmap that you have set for your organisation?
We look at data and analytics as a core competitive advantage for our companies in furthering our business strategy and long term potential.