When Smart Data & Analytics meet the Road

Cars are becoming a necessity more than a luxury with the current pandemic that is challenging the status quo. The automotive industry has seen steady growth over the past few decades, but the evolution of the industry to provide a superior digital user experience is yet to keep pace with this growth. The past decade has seen the utilization of various digital technologies in the process of making, driving, and monitoring a motor vehicle. Various digital technologies like AI/ML, Big Data, Industrial IoT, Spatial Analytics are fast converging upon the automobile industry.
Smart data is helping the automotive industry advance further in several ways by enhancing overall vehicle experience including uptime predictions, reducing the cost of repairs, advanced driver assistance systems and self-driving vehicles. Smart Data collected from automobiles is becoming the new fuel for growth. Converting this to an asset and building new business models atop this is becoming the new norm. Below are the Smart Data Use Cases used in the Automotive Value Chain that have been identified. Superior driving experience within and outside the organization, including data collected by federal agencies, all assist in getting to know the customer better

Automotive Industry & Smart Data

Below are a few areas where the automotive industry is using Smart Data analytics to go to the next level.

Connected Cars:

In today’s connected world, cars are becoming the identity of the owners. Some car makers are enabling this by providing a unique identity as one drives into a bank. Smart Data Analytics has transformed driver experiences, providing predictive and preventive real-time data insights both from inside and outside the environment to improve driver safety, vehicle services and the like, thereby improving the overall driving experience.

Deep Personalized Experience:

Automotive retailers collect massive amounts of customer data both from their customers, and their cars. They create real-time & massive historical insights to provide a personalized experience for car buying, selling, and ancillary opportunities like maintenance, insurance.

Product Quality & Recall Management:

Sensors in automobiles are growing by the day. They collect information like speed, emissions, fuel consumption, usage data for resources, and security. All this data can be used to find patterns and resolve quality issues or prevent them from happening altogether. Analytics is used to improve superior customer experience and quality management at an efficient & effective level. Using this for preventive maintenance will reduce smart recalls

Smart City Planning & Safety:

Smart city problems like effective traffic management, distribution of resources, carbon emission, and environmental issues can be tackled by combining insights from automotive data and other sources such as satellite, mobile, GPS, etc.

Virtual Car Appraisals:

Sensors collect information like speed, usage data, pictures, patterns to evolve the persona of the driver. This Smart Data in combination with data from federal agencies can give insights into car usage, accidents, damages, by identifying patterns from amongst the large data collected. This can be further used to provide the right appraisal for a used car.

Supply Chain Management:

The pandemic has taught us new lessons in supply chain management as parts are manufactured and assembled globally. The global supply chain delays have affected go-to-market for many automobile models, including electric vehicles due to lack of circuitry, sensors, boards, and other essential foundational elements needed to make an automobile. Smart Data comes to the rescue to plan and organize this better, based on the open supply routes and options. Can we build a smart factory with minimal dependency on all resources, including people?
With the advent of industry 5.0, this is now fast becoming a trend in this pandemic world. Automotive manufacturers are rethinking competitive advantage by applying new-age digital technologies to build agility, applied innovative, predictive automation, and intelligence across all areas of the manufacturing life cycle.

The Path Forward:

With the rapid advances in the ever-growing digital world, Smart Data has been the foundational aspect of all these advancements, since the amount of data collected from all the sources increases massively and therefore needs parallel processing to handle. We can now say that Smart Data has finally reignited the digital passion and superior driving experience in the automobile industry.

Authored by Nagesh K P