Konica Minolta provides advanced solutions across office technology, precision medical diagnostics, and advanced optical measurement to drive digital transformation and improve operational efficiency.
The Opportunity: Bring Data into Focus
For more than 150 years, the Konica Minolta name has been synonymous with imaging innovation. However, the enterprise’s American division found itself hindered by legacy, on- premises data systems that began to limit its ability to combine its sales, marketing, service, finance, and government reporting data. Data extraction was a complex, unwieldy process that required both legacy processes and tribal knowledge, preventing users from gaining the holistic data visibility needed to understand the business’ key metrics and uncover new opportunities.
In addition to managing multiple data systems, the company’s small in-house data and analytics team was overwhelmed by requests for data analysis from business users and its network of equipment dealers, requiring it to triage requests and force users to wait for insights. As a result, business managers often had to make decisions without the benefit of data points or trend analysis, increasing costs while preventing proactive action. Konica Minolta decided to digitally transform its approach by migrating its sales, marketing, inventory and service data from on-premise systems to a cloud data warehouse. Not only would this make data more accessible, but it would allow the business to offer self-service analytics and key dashboards to improve decision making. With these dashboards, users could then identify and generate new revenue opportunities for its sales and marketing teams. Meanwhile, operations and service managers would be able to use data to reduce inventory costs and simplify spending.
The Solution: BigQuery, Looker, and Bytecode IO
Konica Minolta decided to leverage Google Cloud Platform’s BigQuery thanks to its ability to offer a scalable, cloud-based data warehouse capable of centralizing its data sources, significantly improving the organization’s data accessibility and performance. To make insights more available for business users, the company selected Looker as its business intelligence platform thanks to its ability to deliver self-serve analytics, and provide governed data for a single source of truth.
Konica Minolta engaged Bytecode IO, the #1 Google Cloud Platform data partner, to leverage their deep expertise in data engineering and analytics. Bytecode IO worked closely with Konica Minolta’s technical applications support teams and business users to define and implement the foundational infrastructure in BigQuery, automate data ingestion pipelines, and create customized analytics in Looker. In addition, Bytecode IO supported Konica Minolta by acting as its primary data and analytics team, allowing internal staff to focus on other critical initiatives.
The Results: Data-Driven Efficiency and New Opportunities
Thanks to Bytecode, BigQuery, and Looker, Konica Minolta has the data infrastructure it needs to face the future with confidence:
- Konica Minolta now has a single source of truth for sales, marketing, service, parts inventory, and leadership, increasing its data visibility while gaining the ability to combine data sets in new ways to answer more complex questions.
- Streamlined data ingestion and new dashboards increased decision-making, enhanced the ability to monitor key metrics like customer lifetime value and orders, and helped users identify cost savings for parts inventory and maintenance.
- The organization was able to reduce its dependency on legacy pipelines, data warehouses, and analytics tools, increasing user efficiency while eliminating the frustration of working with multiple tools and systems. In addition to making data more accessible, Konica Minolta retired five different data systems that were no longer needed, reducing its overhead and the time it takes to manage multiple systems.
- By expanding their self-service capabilities, business users can now explore data and answer questions without submitting a support ticket. Bytecode IO also provided additional training, spurring adoption and increasing ROI.
- Konica Minolta is leveraging BigQuery ML to drive its predictive service capabilities, allowing it to make proactive recommendations rather than be reactive to service requests.
- By leveraging its new predictive service capabilities, the company was able to identify more than $1 million in cost savings opportunities while reducing unexpected downtime.
- A new Control Tower dashboard gives leadership a centralized, near-real-time view of order status and tracking, along with daily direct and sales summaries. This allows leaders to track the company’s progress against established targets while improving the consistency of its sales performance.
- By making data accessible, transparent, and actionable, the company is now able to explore new use cases such as giving dealers the ability to offer preventative maintenance and predictive service, in addition to providing new revenue opportunities by providing increased access to data and insights.
Results at a glance
- Unified data systems into BigQuery for real-time insights and improved decision-making
- Automated data ingestion to save time, reduce errors, and empower staff with self-service analytics
- Built dashboards to enhance visibility into key metrics like sales orders, service trends, parts failure, and required maintenance alerts