If you run a multinational company that manages location data for automotive services, you need technology solutions that can handle big swings with little disruption. We talked to such a company recently. Here’s an excerpt.
Q: What were the challenges you needed to overcome to be successful?
A: We’re a data company, and our data changes continuously. Our clients expect our specialist data sets to be accurate, complete, and constantly up to date. That means we have to constantly update that data, both through our own efforts and through a network of 1,500 vendors. We can’t buy off-the-shelf software to help us do that so we need to find solutions that we can adapt to our needs.
Q: How did you go about addressing those problems?
A: We view our data as a series of distinct assets and we assign large-scale work orders and smaller scale task orders to those assets. We then allocate resources, either internally or externally, and track the work to completion. We also manage a lot of small-scale vendor contracts that need to be subjected to approval workflows, time tracking, and monitoring for completion. That overall picture has a number of similarities with project management systems, so we looked for one that would allow us to adjust it to meet our needs.
Q: What did you do, and how did it help?
A: We chose Clarity from Broadcom. It is highly configurable and allows us to adapt it exactly as we need. We can create as many assets as we need for the subsets of our data and generate all the work orders and task orders associated with those assets. We can also assign resources and our managers can track and approve those allocations.
Based on data update needs, our managers can create custom, small-duration contracts with our vendors, and those contracts can be submitted through a standard workflow for review and approval. In addition, Clarity allows us to track time for those vendors at a team level. As a result, we can consolidate time tracking for each vendor rather than having to do it at the individual resource level, which is much more effective for us.
Q: How is this driving your success?
A: Without Clarity, we simply couldn’t do some of the resource management activities that we carry out, nor could we handle some of the time tracking. We operate in a business where it is essential to have the right data at all times and that only happens when our internal teams and vendors are able to focus on managing and updating that data.
That’s what Clarity allows us to do—it handles all the administration and tracking and frees our people to focus on what makes us who we are.