Could the auto industry be the next to jump into the big data arena?  With the current, tough economic conditions, businesses strives to find cost-saving solutions with improved results. Companies that have large amounts of customer data can have a unique opportunity to take advantage of this information and turn them to greater efficiencies and increased cost savings.

With the advent of big data technologies, automakers are ready to accumulate terabytes of information to meet the evolving needs of their customers and detect trends that can help them to create new products and services.  And the data collection process is developing similarly to mobile devices, taking in our travel data and inferring a variety of conclusions based on our environment and cumulative trends.  Many vehicles are now equipped with GPS and telematics systems, and some car manufacturers have been able to collect and monetize a wealth of data on the driving habits of their customers.

As data-driven knowledge becomes a differentiating factor for marketing and research, the automotive industry will use it to drive and optimize business decisions across multiple sectors.

Ford Sees Massive Possibilities in Big Data

Ford is increasingly reliant on big data, using both internal and external sources to develop their products and marketing offers, as well as enabling strategic decision-making.

“We recognize that the volumes of data we generate internally — from our business operations and also from our vehicle research activities as well as the universe of data that our customers live in and that exists on the Internet — all of those things are huge opportunities for us that will likely require some new specialized techniques or platforms to manage,” said John Ginder, who technically runs the Systems Analytics and Environmental Sciences team in Ford Research. “Our research organization is experimenting with Hadoop and we’re trying to combine all of these various data sources that we have access to. We think the sky is the limit. We recognize that we’re just kind of scraping the tip of the iceberg here.”

The company plans to obtain data from the growing number of implanted sensor technology that can be used at the local level to select a more personalized, convenient and efficient mode of driving. Information collected in this way then can be consolidated to find solutions to problems like traffic jams, helping to improve the flow of traffic should city officials want to leverage this data as well.

“Our manufacturing sites are all very well instrumented. Our vehicles are very well instrumented. They’re closed loop control systems. There are many many sensors in each vehicle… Until now, most of that information was [just] in the vehicle, but we think there’s an opportunity to grab that data and understand better how the car operates and how consumers use the vehicles and feed that information back into our design process and help optimize the user’s experience in the future as well.”

Cars as platforms to access information

The possibility of the car being used as a platform to access to the incoming data in real time contributes to the rapid development of special equipment and software applications. Ford is making efforts to harness both structured and unstructured data for better insights into product design and product development process.

“We use Google Trends, which measures the popularity of search terms, to help inform our own internal sales forecasts,” Ginder explained. “Along with other internal data we have, we use that to build a better forecast. It’s one of the inputs for our sales forecast. In the past, it would just be what we sold last week. Now it’s what we sold last week plus the popularity of the search terms… Again, I think we’re just scratching the surface. There’s a lot more I think we’ll be doing in the future.”

In addition to improving product design through structured and unstructured data, Ford is exploring the opportunity to combine consumer intelligence aspect of external data into company’s own internal data.

“We recognize that the data on the Internet is potentially insightful for understanding what our customers or our potential customers are looking for [and] what their attitudes are, so we do some sentiment analysis around blog posts, comments, and other types of content on the Internet,” said Ginder.

General Motors OnStar Telematics System

General Motors, through their patented OnStar telematics system, not only provides security, information, and diagnostic services to drivers, but is also capturing telemetry data. Through this program, consumers can benefit from substantial savings in car insurance, which greatly increases the degree of customer satisfaction.

This is another example of how car data can extend across industries, creating a picture of consumer behavior and power another system that’s angling for data.  Companies like insurance thrive on data, calculating rates based on a variety of variables that can impact their own bottom line.  A far more personalized use of automobile data, this individual “consumer picture” is one that can give data directly back to the driver.

Business Analytics Solutions

In the recently concluded 2012 SAS Automotive Leadership Forum in Southern California, carmakers explore how the competitive advantage of big data analytics can improve their ability to gain valuable insights from customers’ data and help them to better equip critical supply and demand.

Auto makers like American Honda, Hyundai Motor Company and Shanghai General Motors are using big data analytics solutions from SAS, a leader in business analytics, to resolve complex problems involving supply and demand, customer insights, production, profitability management, service and sustainability.

“SAS gives automakers and other manufacturers the vision to make better strategic decisions to improve operations, gain efficiencies and boost profits,” said David Froning, SAS Product Manager for Warranty Solutions.

New Possibilities

Ford recognizes that the current big data solutions are still relatively new, and advanced systems are needed for managing large sets of data, making it a trying process to discover data solutions that can change the ways a company thinks about a problem.

The company is working in their own sets of big data tools to overcome these issues. Once ready, Ford thinks it can share a lot of its data openly with the larger community.

“Increasingly we’re incorporating cameras on vehicles… What else could we use [camera] data for, and can we combine that high bit-rate data with other kinds of sensor signals to help inform context-awareness for various types of applications, just as another environmental sensor, if you will?” Ginder said. “We’ve got sensors on the car now. We’ve got temperature, pressure, humidity, local concentrations of pollutants (the stuff coming out of tailpipes), so what else can we do with these new sensors? That’s a huge unexplored opportunity for us. Can you build better weather forecasts? Can you make better traffic predictions? Can you help asthmatics avoid certain areas? Can you control the airflow in the car?”