Mobile times are changing rapidly - and due to the digital revolution of the mobility sector, they place very special demands on the qualities of the management. How much Gen-Y must be in today's top management? Which mobility concepts, new partnerships and changed employee profiles are needed so that the German auto industry can continue to say: "Nobody can do mobility as well as we do."
Always online everywhere
In the face of the digital revolution in the automotive and mobility sectors, it is essential for companies and every single manager to be open to new ideas, ways and methods. Surprisingly, it helps to focus on the tried and tested - on what German automotive managers are better at than anybody else. And that is the ability to bring together different partners who together and efficiently create an excellent product.
More and more companies from the IT and telecommunications industry, for example, who originally had nothing to do with automotive, are bustling in the automobile market. Because digitization inside and outside the car is progressing at a gallop. Google was the first company to receive road approval for autonomous vehicles - in Nevada. The manufacturers have long recognized that only with the telecommunications providers and not against them can implement customer-friendly concepts. In addition, in the future, despite the significantly longer model cycles compared to smartphones, it will always be possible to harness the latest communication technology in the car. It is no coincidence that there is a lot at the heart of all computer fairs about the networking of cars and smartphones.
Modern mobility is only possible through digitization
In the future, other means of transport such as buses, trains, airplanes, taxi and car sharing will increasingly be included in the individual route planning. Multi-modal mobility - that is, the integrated use of different modes of transport - will be easy to plan and use, since there are suitable apps that show us the optimal connections and costs of combinations of different traffic offers. Elaborate planning and hours of analyzing timetables of different providers and cities is no longer necessary.
The universal availability of smartphones makes the intermodality socially acceptable and the spread of car sharing in the mass market possible. In addition, telematics services enable autonomous driving and the sensible use of electromobility in the first place.
The Gen-Y shares everything
Young urbanites of the western world are placing less and less value on classic status symbols. In Gen-Y, this change in values goes hand in hand with the natural sharing of property or commodities. As a result, the automobile and especially the ownership of a car of its own no longer have the same status as in the late 1990s.
The smartphone has set out to run the car as the "favorite toy" in the digital age. This also indicates that the number of license holders in megacities is steadily declining and brand loyalty in the volume segment is falling. From this follows an important insight: Each country of this earth, each social group has different requirements, which are based on the individual framework conditions. Anyone who represents customer wishes in a single business model, offers only a small vehicle portfolio, drives into a dead end . Consequently, the number of so-called niche models is increasing. Manufacturers must answer the question of how finely they cluster their customer segments and how customizable their vehicles are.
Revolution in production: Industry 4.0 and 3-D printing
Production is also facing a revolution. By networking machines, such as their connection to the Internet, machines communicate with each other (Industry 4.0). This enables the development of highly efficient and highly flexible (mass production) production processes. Especially in the automotive industry, with the extremely high number of variants, there are great potentials, for example, can be as the integration of suppliers into the just-in-time - or just-in-sequence production of automobile manufacturers are optimized, as the current (remote ) Monitoring of production and quality indicators.
From the dealership to the adventure purchase
But the (digital) change does not stop at sales bosses, salesmen and marketing experts. In order to better understand target groups and to improve the target group approach, it is advisable to look beyond the box for German carmakers: What are other top performers such as internet companies or adventure companies doing differently and correctly?
From thinking outside the boxbeyond the perfecting of the customer experience, the purchase emotion, to the anticipation of customer wishes: the digitization of our world of life and experience also presents the sales manager with new tasks - and at the same time opens up new possibilities for him. On the one hand, potential customers today come to the store much better and more informed because they used all the important online and offline media before the sales pitch. The task of the sales department is to provide all relevant channels through which customers can and want to get to the product. In the future, ideally, this will no longer be based on the multi-channel approach, in which each channel - for example, the local dealer or the smartphone - stands alone and acts.Automakers will embrace the omni-channel approach, which integrates all sales and marketing channels on an equal footing and provides a unified customer experience . For the future, this also means closer strategic cooperation from R & D to the dealership.
The three major German premium manufacturers have already initiated and implemented new sales concepts. For example, in a redesigned showroom on the Kurfürstendamm , customers can use state-of-the-art digital technology to configure their dream car and get to know the brand as a lifestyle factor. Another manufacturer takes a similar approach with its Future Retail concept: modern, architecturally impressive brand stores strengthen the customer's brand experience; Design, lifestyle and shopping experience are even more important.
Well prepared for the future
Automobile managers must operationalize the many new ideas in business models. That's where things get started: For the IT managers in the automotive groups, this means that they must form the technical backbone that makes companies competitive in the new digital world of mobility. This requires CIOs and their employees to ensure that strategists and innovation managers can really make the most of the potential of the new data analytics.
In addition, the new business models usually have different drivers than the classic volume-driven automotive business. For example, corporate management needs different key figures. These are, for example, clicks, downloads, users, time on a webpage, rental periods instead of just the number of cars sold. The reporting and performance management must be adapted to this.
Other employee profiles are searched. It makes a difference whether the seller sells a product of several thousand euros, or a service like car-sharing, which is already available for a few euros. Business processes have to be changed, IT systems must be adapted and organizational structures must be recreated. There are many more examples - digitization and transformation runs through all departments. Wanted are profiles that think of a holistic digitization strategyand to put into practice the new potentials for all functions systematically realized while the resulting new risks, such as in the field of data protection and IT security, reduced or ideally avoided altogether. In order for the German automotive industry to retain its leading position worldwide, it is now time to tackle these tasks intelligently.
