On October 14 I spent the day at Toyota's Opportunity Exchange and came home with thirty contacts. I walked in with one idea.
Before I started the studio, I sold cars at Asbury Automotive, a group of more than 150 dealerships. Serving one buyer took four or five systems, each with its own login. When Asbury moved to one platform, the time it took to serve a buyer came down. What Tekion built for car dealers, we build for contractors.
A plant that supplies a carmaker has the same shape of problem. A quote is priced in a spreadsheet. The release arrives through the customer's portal. A schedule change arrives in an email. What it cost the plant lives in someone's head. That is the picture I walked in with. I have not confirmed it with the people I met, and the calls I have booked for Monday are how I find out.
So I built the smallest honest version of the answer, and called it Quote to Release. Each new release is compared line by line with the last one. Each schedule change is costed from the plant's own rates. The plant and its customer see the same number, so both sides can plan with it.
It runs on a made-up stamping plant, with fictional names and numbers, so nobody has to hand over real data to see it work. We show it on the Read. The Read is twenty minutes and free. You tell us the one process that costs you the most, and we say back what we heard.
Mark Riley