Reduces analysis time and improves enterprise productivity by choosing SAS^® Visual Analytics

Volkswagen Finance streamlined enterprise wide reporting and enabled self-service analytics using SAS^® Visual Analytics

Volkswagen Finance Private Limited (‘VWFPL’), incorporated in 2009 and headquartered in Mumbai is jointly owned by Volkswagen Financial Services AG, Germany, and Volkswagen Finance Overseas BV, Netherlands. VWFPL currently supports customers of the Volkswagen Group in India by facilitating delivery of innovative financing and insurance solutions. With a comprehensive range of financial services products, the company makes a significant contribution to the promotion and securing of Volkswagen Group sales and strengthens the link between the customers and the Volkswagen Group brands.

The company wanted to streamline the process of retrieving large volumes of data from a variety of business applications within the organization and then leverage the data effectively in a scalable solution to develop reports which can be shared across the organization. As the company grew, so did the amount of data and the requirements for reports. The Internal IT team, which was dependent on a third-party vendor to develop and modify reports, was exploring solutions to cut down time, infrastructure cost and man hours spent on report development. With SAS^® Visual Analytics, VWFPL were able to achieve all of this and so much more..

Empowering employees with a powerful analytics solution

For the IT team at VWFPL, SAS^® Visual Analytics was an easy choice for driving their business analytics and enterprise reporting needs. The team knew that they can trust the quality of the results delivered by SAS Analytics as SAS has been applying analytics to the toughest business problems for decades. Powerful analytics delivered was backed by a robust security framework for the underlying data. The team found SAS^® Visual Analytics and SAS® Enterprise Guide intuitive and very easy to learn. Packaged programs or procedures significantly reduce the amount of code needed to deliver functionality with simple commands.

SAS^® Visual Analytics empowered the teams by equipping them with an easy-to-use tool to create and analyze their own data and reports. This was delivered along with improvements in speed and operational efficiency. Self-service data extraction and ad hoc querying is now part of the day-to-day activities of business users.

Challenge

• Improve large volumes of data retrieval and sharinge across groups within the organizational chains to optimize operations and make quicker decisions.
• Minimize costs and work hours involved in report development and modification.

Benefits

• A centralized view across Volkswagen Finance’s organizational chains for improved financial and collaborative alignment.
• A dynamic organization eliminating silos between departments and business components to enable better and faster decision making.
• Saved thousands of work hours by reducing report development time.
• Enabled self-service analytics across the organization.
  

Shared Visualizations

With SAS® Visual Analytics, the business users can run their own analyses and discovery without requiring extensive IT support. They can generate and share their own reports, dashboards and visualizations simply by clicking or drilling into items of interest. Additionally, they can also do non-functional changes like changing the sequence of columns, color and date format changes etc. in a couple of clicks.

With exhaustive data manipulations and business logics built in the solution, combined with a reporting interface, business analysts can focus more on fetching answers rather than validating business scenarios. In an era of visualizations, the users can now play around with the data, quickly grasp the meaning of the data provided and make informed decisions.

One solution for all reports

Prior to SAS^® Visual Analytics, enterprise reporting was largely excel based which involved a lot of manual work. For example, business users used to export the data from the core lending suite and create their own graphs in excel using the data. Now, the business users can pull all the data in SAS^® Enterprise Guide directly, manipulate it using a few lines of code and then push it to SAS Visual Analytics to further explore and analyze the data and create reports which can be used across departments. Since SAS can manage large volumes of data, the company was able to meet most of their reporting needs using SAS^® Visual Analytics with requirements ranging from analyzing lending suite data to creating internal reports for the management to creating external reports for dealers. These reports can be refreshed automatically at a fixed frequency thus ensuring that all the business users had the most updated and holistic view of data while taking important business decisions.

With the implementation of one enterprise reporting solution, VWFPL was successful in reducing dependency of different applications (like the Core Lending Suite) and cut down on the time IT analysts spent on accessing data for other business users and enabling them to focus on more sophisticated jobs that create more value for the company.