It can be hard to face up to the embedded and often unwritten culture which gets in the way of innovation and progress. That is until a crisis arises which stops most operations in their tracks and opens up a space in which fresh new approaches can be adopted once normal service is resumed.
For sectors like aviation, automotive and retail, the global Covid-19 pandemic of 2020-21 froze their markets and required rapid re-thinking. From supply chains that started in the virus’s country of origin China being interrupted through to customers being locked down and unable to make any purchases, the result was to expose much of the underlying operational structure.
Jaguar Land Rover found itself facing both of those factors with a manufacturing and supply chain spread between the UK and China, plus customers delaying new car purchases since they were not permitted to drive them anywhere. By lucky coincidence, this existential crisis coincided with an innovation sprint by the data function with its digital department.
Planning how to build a new car is so complicated at JLR that it involves more variables than there are grains of sand on Earth. Decisions about how to change or optimise these activities was highly manual and time-consuming, meaning a cautious approach to innovation and also a lack of visibility into the impact of different choices.
Provisioning a data science team with the relevant information and bringing a fresh mindset to bear led to a remarkable new solution that picked up this year’s DataIQ Grand Prix, as well as an award for the Best data-enabling solution. Vehicle simulator allows the organisation’s divisions to map out complex engineering issues and the multiple possibilities within each model before going into live production. The result has been cost-savings of more than £100 million.
Two things produced this brilliant solution. The first was a team which saw it as a data problem, rather than following established automotive practices – in fact, they had no background in the car industry. The second was an executive which was open to innovative ideas – in fact, it had an urgent need for them, especially if cost-savings would result.
Not all organisations are so welcoming. On Awards night itself, I had a lengthy conversation with a team of talented data practitioners working inside one of the largest organisations in the UK, but one that has a deeply engrained culture and is highly-resistant to change.
This data team had been able to develop an innovative and effective approach to real-time situational analysis within a non-core territory. There they had demonstrated the impact and resilience of their solution. But when pitching it into their home organisation, multiple reasons were given for not adopting it, most of which boiled down to, “that’s not how we do things”.
Self-reflection is not easy for anybody and it is rare to find an executive board that is willing to take a long, hard look at itself and decide it is time to change. Sometimes, it takes a crisis to make that happen. Rarely, it is because the data department has gained the time and attention of the board with a significantly better way of doing business.
More’s the pity because the benefits nearly always outweigh the costs of disruption, while new streamlined processes are typically easier to operate than established, manual ones. That doesn’t mean wishing for a crisis in order to trigger data-driven change. But if one does happen to come along, seize the opportunity!
Jaguar Land Rover is a keynote speaker at our Way of the 100 conference on 3rd November 2022. Register here for your place (only available for client-side data and analytics leaders and practitioners).
