The Customer is Job 1 at Ford

SAS Fuels CRM Programs for Global Auto Maker

At Ford, the drive to meet customer needs began nearly 100 years ago with one man's dream to put America on wheels. While the needs of automotive customers have evolved dramatically since the Model T, Henry Ford's vision continues on a grand, global scale in an industry where automotive ingenuity and customer loyalty fuel success.

Today, a new SAS platform that supports customer relationship management (CRM) applications helps ensure high customer satisfaction levels for the more than 30 million drivers of Ford brand automobiles around the world. The reliable SAS solution augments Ford's existing Teradata database and provides a flexible, powerful platform for data mining, predictive modeling and information analysis.

A clear vision for data management
Extracting data from the Teradata warehouse, the SAS platform supports a variety of functions, including reporting, trending, segmentation, customer scoring, and customer life-cycle analysis, which support key activities for CRM and campaign management. But according to Jim Ader, IT coordinator for analytics at Ford, predictive modeling is the most important endeavor supported by SAS.

"Using data modeling to leverage your understanding of customers and the way that you treat them is the key to customer relationship management," says Ader. "In the future, one of the big challenges for any company marketing to consumers will be to use models more and more effectively."

At Ford, marketing professionals use predictive models to target the right customers for more than 200 marketing campaigns every year, including promotions for Ford's Lincoln, Mercury and Jaguar brands. The models, created in SAS Enterprise Miner by Ford's analytical research consultants, examine millions of customer records and select the best households to target for each campaign.

"If you're going to design a platform for your customer knowledge system, you really need to understand your data, your data environment and the data structures that you've built," says Ader. "In the CRM world, having a good understanding of your data models and your data environment, and having a good vision are keys to an effective IT environment."

Easy, transparent access to Teradata
SAS helped provide that vision for Ford with its new SAS/ACCESS Interface to Teradata. Ford's Teradata warehouse contains nearly 1.6 Terabytes of data on more than 33 million customers, including warranty information, survey results, retail sales feeds, finance records and more. With SAS/ACCESS, Ford can combine the power of SAS' analytic and data management capabilities with the parallel processing power of NCR's Teradata relational database management system.

Previously, Ford relied on a complex and arduous data transformation process that was cumbersome and time consuming. It involved unloading data from their Teradata warehouse to an IBM mainframe, then FTPing the data from the mainframe to an HP server and finally using SAS input statements to load it into SAS data sets. Now, the process is streamlined and efficient: data transforms directly from Teradata to SAS, and the weekly load time is reduced from a 20-hour process to just five hours.

"The primary benefit is efficiency and simplicity," says Ader. "The SAS/ACCESS to Teradata product allows us to seamlessly integrate our heavy analytic functionality and our SAS data mart with a large Teradata warehouse, so we can leverage the power of SAS with the strengths of Teradata."

Ader likes the relational Teradata environment for its heavy parallel processing capabilities, but he says SAS provides a more flexible environment for the company's CRM efforts. "Teradata makes it easy to store and process large quantities of data. If you combine that with the excellent data manipulation and statistical analytic capabilities of SAS in a client server environment, then you really have the best of both worlds. The more you can leverage and integrate these two environments, the more powerful your functionality is."

SAS delivers increased ROI and improved customer satisfaction
SAS provides fast, direct and transparent access to all Teradata database tables and easy integration with all SAS solutions, including Ford's ASAP application, short for Automated Scoring Assignment Process.

Ford's scoring process, powered by SAS' Enterprise Miner, analyzes customers at the household level and automatically applies predictive models to each household in the database, then sends that information back to the Teradata warehouse. This gives Ford's marketing teams easy access to a variety of up-to-date customer scores, which they use to manage outbound marketing campaigns and inbound traffic at the customer call center.

"Having a nicely structured household data mart on a UNIX server where you can use it either from your PC with SAS Enterprise Miner or on the server provides a very flexible, powerful environment for our marketing efforts to become more efficient and more effective," explains Ader.

Ader says the combined SAS, Teradata solution saves time and lessens conflicts with system maintenance windows. But more importantly, the customer knowledge that's available as a result of the new SAS environment improves Ford's marketing and CRM efforts. "SAS helps us see real results – in a higher return on investment for Ford and a higher customer satisfaction level for our customers," he says.

While he's reluctant to place a dollar figure on the results, Ader says, "The company has definitely seen a return on investment. Ford has seen significant increases in incremental sales as a result of the whole system."

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