Data Integration Rollout Optimized for Major OEM

For more than a decade, Motive Retail has been helping major manufacturers simplify and expedite integrations with their retail partners with the peace of mind that the data exchanged between their systems in production will drive more efficient processes and lay the foundation for accurate and timely business insights.

Motive Retail worked with a major US automaker (OEM) to optimize the global rollout of its data integration program with its retail partners. The program gathers data from the OEM’s global retail operations network to drive business intelligence and inform business processes.  The data is also used to manage incentives, improve customer retention, survey customers, and to share performance metrics across the corporate and dealer network.

In times of IT convergence and IT demand management, a major US car manufacturer needed a supplier to truly partner with to realize the global data integration it envisioned with its retail network. The OEM chose Motive Retail to leverage its proven, test-driven development approach to systems integration and its world class, SME support staff to ensure the initiative’s success.

The primary goal of the initiative was to integrate all global retail partners to its real-time APIs within a year, which entailed integrating to over 60 diverse dealer management systems (DMS) in more than 20 countries, and to do so without overspending OEM resources.  Key to the success was transparent communication and presentation of all program information – from technical specifications to program implementation expectations. 

The OEM had worked with Motive Retail previously to deliver certified integrations to prior versions of their APIs with approximately 100 service providers (DSPs) globally, and was used to a high level of service, and quality production results. With over 8000 dealers in 59 global markets, the OEM needed a dedicated partner to help maintain systems excellence. 

While the OEM had existing integrations with retail partners worldwide, the DSPs were integrated to different releases of the OEM database, which meant data was coming in to the OEM’s systems with varying formats, and in most cases, not in real-time.  That made aggregating, normalizing and drawing useful, timely conclusions from the data a major challenge.  From the integrating DSP perspective, the effort to integrate to the newest version had different requirements depending on whether the DSP was upgrading existing integrations or integrating for the first time.

In Europe, GDPR privacy law forced major unique changes to how consumer data was to be shared across the OEM’s retail ecosystem.