Automotive sector has been one of the key growth areas in emerging markets such as India where it continues to grow at an even faster rate. According to KPMG research, the automotive sector contributes to roughly 5 percent of India’s GDP today, and is poised to become 10 percent of GDP by 2016 amounting to about USD 145 billion. Within the overall automotive sector, the Automotive Aftermarket size represents about USD 15.65 billion. One of the key areas for this industry’s growth and subsequent contribution in the Automotive Aftermarket is Automotive Servicing. In terms of turnover, the size of the automotive service market in India is estimated at about USD 8 billion today.
Automotive Aftermarket Size
As the industry grows and transforms, it is crucial that the automotive service capability evolves likewise. Providing effective after sales service for vehicles has assumed increased importance for OEMs in India. Not only do manufacturers need to provide a range of services and have a widespread organized service network to cater to the ever increasing number of vehicles on the road, but also ensure high levels of service quality and delivery, to retain customers. The sudden increase of options and rapidly evolving product technology are other elements that add to the challenge. Today, automotive customers are more aware and demanding, and have less tolerance for delays, poor quality service or repeat complaints. As a result, service providers today are keenly focused on improving not only the technical aspect of servicing, but also the softer aspects of customer management. Continuous improvements are made in improving service quality, vehicle turnaround times and customer satisfaction.
Three key success factors for automotive servicing:
- Ensuring availability of adequate numbers of skilled manpower, across different locations and different levels including not only technical skills, but also business management s and customer management skills.
- Continuous improvement in productivity and quality, to reduce turnaround times, improve capacity utilization, reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction
- Focus on softer aspects of customer management and innovate to retain customer loyalty
One of the key gap areas is managing the auto body shop from order-2-cash cycle including accident repairs, body work and painting. Adequate attention is required to manage the body shop effectively and efficiently. Despite modern tools and techniques for body repairs being available, most personnel still prefer to go by traditional, manual methods that have been used by earlier generations of mechanics. Today, from customer point of view, there are delays in getting the damaged or accident vehicle repaired. There is inconvenience to the customer, higher car rental cost and no visibility into current status of job and delivery of the vehicle. From body shop’s point of view, there are low utilization of existing asset and resources. The body shop doesn’t have visibility into current status of work in progress which in turn can lead to poor quality of workmanship and poor customer service. It also doesn’t have any tools for continuous performance improvement.
VehicleTRx is the solution designed to optimize the order-2-cash cycle of an automobile body shop and enable real-time collaboration between vehicle owners, body shops and insurance providers. It automates various manual hand-offs between different stages of repair cycle thereby speeding the cycle from order to cash. It extends visibility to repair order and delivery information to individuals across all departments (or stages) involved throughout the order-to-cash cycle in real-time. Click here for more details on VehicleTRx