How Yokohama Tire Canada Improved Profitability Through Solutions Facilitating Increased Collaboration

Yokohama Tire Canada is a major distributing company that sells and distributes 2,000 different tire products in Canada through 3,800 dealers.

Challenges

Despite the success of its business model in terms of size and growth, Yokohama was facing challenges in improving its operational efficiency in certain areas:

•         Manual processes when quoting prices in dealer agreements
•         Slow information flow and decision-making
•         Many different and non-consolidated information systems
•         Relevant information trapped in siloes and not shared
•         Existing IT systems not leverage to their full potential

These challenges eventually led Yokohama to hire Spot Solutions in an attempt to improve their quote development and approval process. This was done through Microsoft SharePoint 2010, which was already in place, but not exploited.

Solution

Spot Solutions developed SharePoint integration consisting of a sophisticated workflow with a highly integrated quote form. Editing and adjustments to the quote process was now real-time and interactive thereby allowing multiple users to assess and change quote information continuously. The previous (inefficient) manual flow of information was thereby irrevocably buried.

Results

The results of this improved system setup were substantial and led to significant improvements in connection, communication and information exchange across credit, sales, service staff and executive management.

Yokohama thus managed to bring its quote process down from around 7 days to 48 hours – and the following year further down to 18.5 hours. In addition, Yokohama quoted increased visibility, optimization and automation as well as better customer service as key benefits achieved. Yokohama was able to handle a 25% increase in number of quotes without hiring any additional staff. Impressive!

This post is based on a Microsoft Case Study. Read the full article on Yokohama Tire here or visit Yokohama Tire Canada here: www.yokohama.ca.