15 Apr 2018

Komatsu Australia

Delivering Sales and Customer Insights to a Leading Supplier of Earthmoving Equipment

3 mins reading time

Case Study | Komatsu Australia

Delivering Sales and Customer Insights to a Leading Supplier of Earthmoving Equipment


The Project

Komatsu Australia is a leading supplier of earthmoving equipment, parts and service for the mining, construction and utility markets. It offers a full product line up with quality parts and reliable service to meet all of its customers’ needs in the earthmoving industries. Komatsu Australia has thousands of customers across Australia, New Zealand and New Caledonia purchasing millions of dollars worth of equipment, parts and services every year. In a combined effort with Cue Consulting Pty Ltd, Komatsu’s Construction Solutions team engaged Felipe Rego to help build and deliver a deeper understanding of its aftermarket parts sales performance and customer profile.

Objectives

Discover trends, profile customers and track sales

Komatsu’s aftermarket parts sales were strong and growing year over year but management wanted to ensure performance was maintained and continually improved over time. With that in mind, the project focused on:

  • Applying an exploratory data analysis to the aftermarket parts sales dataset in an attempt to generate novel views that provided additional insights on sales strategy;
  • Building a initial customer segmentation model for improved account management and sales effectiveness;
  • Creating an aftermarket parts sales benchmark by different equipment to identify untapped cross-sell opportunities;

Methodology

Utilising existing data and BI infrastructure to create powerful insights aligned to business objectives

In strong partnership with its internal analytics team, the project focused on leveraging existing work previously done and taking it further. Additionally, management had a good set of hypothesis and assumptions it wanted tested. But for it to be successful, the approach had to consider:

  • Frequent stakeholder involvement for it to be purposeful;
  • Any existing work previously done for it to be of additional value;
  • An easy-to-understand approach to designing the visualisations for it be interpretable and actionable;

More than 50 different individual pieces of data visualisations were initially created, combining relationships and sales patterns by customer, equipment and parts across attributes such as time, geography, accounts, etc. The final solution incorporated a set of 30+ individual pieces of insights, an initial aftermarket parts benchmark and a customer segmentation model.

Results

Enabling more sales and better customer management

Felipe Rego helped Komatsu’s Construction Solutions team gain a deeper understanding of their business, enabling further sales opportunities and improved customer relationship approach.

”Felipe helped us gain further insights and discover new ways we could grow our aftermarket parts sales in a short period of time. He immediately brought to the table some really innovative ways we could use data and analytics in this project and from the first meeting I was impressed with his ideas and suggestions. He went on to learn the business pretty quickly, constantly communicating with my team and, at the end, we were very impressed with the output of his work.”- Todd Connolly, General Manager - Construction Solutions at Komatsu Australia

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