Case Studies

CD-ROMs Help Yamaha Motorcycle Dealers Obtain Instant Parts Information

New CD-ROMs are helping Yamaha Motors Australia (YMA) dealers improve customer service by obtaining parts information faster than was ever possible before. In the past, when a customer asked for information about a particular part, the counter person typically had to leave and attempts to find the part by searching through paper or microfiche catalogs. The new CD-ROMs, produced by IHS Enterprise Solutions, Englewood, Colorado, allow the counter person to find the part information much faster, usually in under a minute, without leaving the customer. The time and skill required to find the right parts are dramatically reduced because the counter person merely has to type in a few search terms, such as "bulb" "12v and 2w", to find the information in far less time than would be required to page through catalogs or microfiche.

YMA, Wetherill Park, Australia, is a distribution arm of Yamaha Motor Japan, one of the world's leading producers of motorcycles, boats, outboard motors and other products. The products sold by YMA include a wide range of recreational items and industrial products, such as motorcycles, scooters, four-wheelers, snowmobiles, outboards, water vehicles, boats, golf cars, gokart engines, power generators, water and sludge pumps, industrial engines and accessories. YMA was incorporated in June 1983 with distribution rights in New South Wales and took on distribution in Victoria later the same year. Within a few years, the company also began distribution for Western Australia and Queensland. In the 1990s, the company began production of fiberglass boats at a facility located in Ourimbah, north of Sydney.

Problems with Paper and Microfiche Catalogs
Providing parts information to its network of over 300 distributors throughout Australia is an important and challenging task for YMA. The company has long produced both paper and microfiche catalogs that cover the huge number of parts required to service the company's products for the Australian market. The space required by the paper catalogs and the special equipment needed to view the microfiche catalogs means that these catalogs must usually be stored away from the parts desk. When a customer approaches the counter person and asks about a particular part, the counter person takes the information and goes to the area where the catalogs are kept. It then often takes a fair amount of time to locate the right item, either by paging through the books or by searching the microfiche, while customers are kept waiting. Other problems with the old approach included the high cost of printing the paper catalogs and the fact that they quickly became outdated.

YMA management recognized switching over to CD-ROMs as the primary method of supplying parts information to distributors would address all of these issues. Yamaha operations in North America and Europe had previously created CD products that provided complete parts information but differences in regulations created significant differences between the products sold by the different operations. YMA management felt that it would be an extremely difficult task to adapt either one of these products and so decided to build their own.

Selecting a Development Partner
"We felt that a CD-ROM could provide an excellent platform for distributing parts information to our dealers," said Colin Iskov, National Parts Operations Manager for YMA. "We began looking for a development partner with the experience necessary to create an end product that would be well received by our rightfully very demanding dealers. IHS Enterprise Solutions showed us a wide range of very attractive and highly functional CDs they had produced for their many clients. We were impressed by their experience over a broad range of delivery options including CD-ROM, DVD, Internet and others. Their solution was surprisingly affordable considering the high value that it offered."

IHS Enterprise Solutions developers set up a process to scan in the data from the existing parts catalogs and perform optical character recognition to read the text. They also used special programs designed to identify and correct OCR errors. "This method has provided us with a very high level of accuracy at a reasonable cost," Iskov said. "We did the final proofing by hand and found only a very small number of errors." IHS converted the information to the format used by Dataware's CD-Author program, the database used on the CD. Then developers created a customer querying application in Visual C++ designed to help dealers easily find the right parts. This application makes it possible to search by model, part description, year, prefix and part number.

Preparing a Pilot Version
"IHS prepared a pilot version of the user interface very quickly," Iskov continued. "We presented it at a national dealer convention in order to obtain feedback from potential users. Their reaction was generally very favorable but they also provided some very good suggestions that we incorporated into the final product. Our basic idea was to provide a simple and clean interface that has a similar feel to basic Windows productivity applications that most of our dealers are already familiar with. The new application met all our requirements and has received a very positive reception from its users."

The CD-ROM was designed from the start to integrate with YMA's highly successful dealer communications system, called Yamaha Dealer Connect (YDC). The parts catalog contained on the CD-ROM is linked to pricing information that is contained on the YDC computer and updated on a regular basis through a network connection to YMA. Most of the major developers of the software that dealers used to run their business operations have also created links to the new CD-ROM. Users of these programs are able to transfer the items that generated in the parts catalog search into a quotation that can later be cancelled or turned into an order.

Improved Customer Service
"The biggest overall advantage of the new system is the improved service that the counter person is able to provide to the customer," Iskov said. "They can stay at their terminal and work with the customer to find the right part. The customer can look at the screen and help pick out the exact item that is needed. The counter person has the choice displaying or not displaying the prices that they are paying for the product. Our dealers have recognized the value of the product and so far 203 have purchased the CD-ROM out of a potential market of about 250 dealers with the computer equipment required to take advantage of it."

A good example of how it works would be to look more closely at the search described above for "bulb" "12v and 2w". It finds 32 instances of bulbs meeting the description that was entered. The user can view a graphical and textual description of each by highlighting the item in the found box and clicking on the display. In searching for a particular model year, counter people can use the ">" or "<"icons to search over a range of models by year. For example, to search for models years from 1991 to 1994, you would type in the year column ">1990 and <1995". The user can further refine the search by entering a model year such as YZ125, which would bring up all parts for this particular model over these years. Then, typically, the counter person would add a description of the part for which they are looking, such as "Jet*". This particular search brings up 42 different jets found in these model years. Or the counter person could limit the search to "jet" and main*) to only search for main jets.

Recent enhancements
YMA has continued to enhance the product. The latest version offers a number of new features. For example, each frame can now be resized on the screen by dragging the borders of the screen to expand or contract the area. When the mouse is positioned on the split bar, the pointer changes to indicate that dragging is possible. When the frames have been resized, they remain that way until the next time the user changes them. Other improvements include an increase in ordering speed and the ability to view parts news on the CD-ROM.

"This project has been very successful in accomplishing its major goal, helping our dealers to provide better service to their customers," Iskov concluded. "The product created by IHS is of the highest level of quality and has been very well received by its users. It has helped us at Yamaha to reinforce our position as the technological leader in the motorcycle business. Our plans are to continue to develop and enhance the CD-ROM, by possibly providing the ability for dealers to enter their own retail prices in the product."

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