The automotive service company amassed vast amounts of data from its fleet and used it to extract insights to improve the customer and employee experience.
Jarrod Phipps, Chief Information Officer at Holman, said working for the automotive specialist was an all-round leadership challenge. Phipps, who brings together two decades of technology experience at the world's largest consumer goods, retail and healthcare companies, was appointed Chief Information Officer of Holman earlier this year.
"Every morning, I wake up thinking about how we can be more agile and allow us to deliver capacity faster without disrupting the stability we need to operate as a business," he says. ”
Prior to joining Holman, Phipps worked for footwear specialist Clarks, retailer Ac.Moore and PEP Boys, an auto repair company, serve as IT leaders. In his first year at Holman, he says, his focus has been on transforming the way the technology department works with the rest of the company.
"I'm rethinking how we should interface with the business, how we interface with each other within the technology department, and I'm positioning the agility that we're all looking for," Phipps said. ”
To define what agility means for IT in an era of near-constant digital change, he says, "My goal is to get technology slightly ahead of the business. That's my goal – to be in the real sweet spot, maybe just an inch ahead, not behind the rest of the business. That's what we've been working on for the last year. ”
Reinvent the experience
Headquartered in Laurel Hill, New Jersey, Holman is one of the largest family-owned car service agencies in North America. The company employs more than 6,500 people in North America, the United Kingdom, and Germany.
The company has two businesses. For starters, the company operates 40 dealers in the U.S., which Phipps describes as a "nice standardized business." While these agencies make heavy use of technology, Phipps says that the practice of standardizing the entire network means that there is no large number of customized IT systems.
Holman's second business is fleet management, which Phipps says is much larger than retail and is entirely technology-driven. He said Holman's fleet companies operate millions of vehicles on behalf of customers. Technology is the only way to manage your fleet efficiently.
"Our fleet management business needs to be digitalized more than anything else I've seen," Phipps said. ”
We can streamline processes, optimize the customer and employee experience, and more. So, for me, the main thing that attracted me to Holman was that it put technology in a very strategic position, and I could get to the front and heart of it. ”
According to Phipps, the culture of the family-owned business places a high value on people. As CIO, it's his job to implement tools, methods, and processes to help the company's employees, both new and long-time, deliver high-quality service to their customers.
"Over the next 24 months, my focus will be on reinventing the employee experience, digitizing as much of this area as possible, improving efficiency and making it easier for newcomers to get started," he said. ”
I always tell my team that my goal is for the employees who are new to Holman to deliver the same exceptional customer experience as the veterans who have been here for more than two decades. ”
Standardize processes
Phipps says that to achieve its experience-driven goals, it must ensure that the technology used by its teams is as employee-centric internally and customer-centric as possible externally. One of the priorities for the next two years is data analytics.
"This means providing information to all stakeholders, both internal and external," he said. "At the end of the day, we're running a data-driven business, specifically our fleet management business. We have a lot of data about each car. ”
Although less than a year into the role, PHIPPS has already begun to help companies get the most out of their data assets. "This work means standardizing the way we interface with the business in a more product-focused way," he said. It's a lot of work, and with the emphasis on product management, we're paying more attention to agile processes. ”
PHIPPS supports this transformation through the use of automation and continuous improvement technologies. From a data and analytics perspective, companies have invested heavily in cloud-based infrastructure.
"This work has already begun, but since I've been here, we've stepped up our work," he said. We are now at a tipping point where we are starting to roll out this technology to a wider audience. ”
We're using some of the hyperscale cloud database analytics and database technologies to drive data lakes. Now, we're moving down the path of (Microsoft) Power BI in order to get our message to different audiences. ”
Tell a story
Holman also collects data through emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT). The company has a complete telematics system, and Phipps says his team has access to event-level information from thousands of vehicles, from emergency braking data to dashboard maintenance indicators and engine performance.
"We have event-level information about everything that's happening on the vehicle and we can integrate it into our broader solution," he says. Let me give you an example of how this process works. If one of our customers brakes too hard or someone makes a bad turn, we feed this data back into our training modules. ”
Driver training is then triggered so customers can go to their insurer and talk about the safety measures they've put in place and why they should get a better premium. As a result, we have a fully integrated solution that takes information and incorporates it into our broader ecosystem. ”
In the coming years, PHIPPS wants to further improve the company's information visualization capabilities.
"For better or for worse, we need the ability to tell visual stories that inspire insight," he says. ”
If we see these insights, we need to interact. We need to be able to interact with information and find out why things are happening. We need to be able to do this with the data at our fingertips. Then, once we've found the 'why', we need to look at the lowest granularity of the information set. ”
Adopting this detailed, visual approach means that Holman's employees can leverage best practices to improve existing operational processes and improve the customer experience. According to Phipps, the long-term goal is to use data to prompt companies to take proactive interventions.
"If we have a high level of understanding, can we remind us of an example that will help us take corrective action immediately," he saidAnd then can we do more of that?We're a very diverse business with a wealth of data, and we just want to get insights to our employees' fingertips. ”
Embrace innovation
While Holman is already exploring analytics, IoT, and automation, Phipps recognises that other emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence will also have an impact. His role is to ensure that the company leverages data to develop a proactive approach to service.
"One of the most important things for fleet management companies is to help customers understand when they should replace a vehicle that has reached the end of its useful life," he said. When maintenance costs are rising and your assets are in poor condition, you may want to switch to a new car to reduce your short- and medium-term expenses. ”
We also often talk about the transition from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles (EVs). This is a big problem for many of our major teams. So, how do you manage the cost difference and complexity of an EV fleet versus an internal combustion engine fleet?Modeling some of these key decision points will be crucial. ”
According to Phipps, the key to unlocking higher-level analytics is to ensure that organizations can take advantage of new data-driven opportunities as they arise. "As long as we have the right platform, we have to be able to experiment," he said. ”
I don't think anyone can use the crystal ball to figure out where the future wealth is. We just need to be able to innovate and experiment, because in 24 months, we may be where no one can see today. ”