🚗 Automotive · Case Study

Sales & Operations
Intelligence Platform

End-to-end Power BI migration, real-time operational dashboards, and Python-automated workflows for North American automotive operations serving Honda and General Motors.

30%
Manual Effort Reduced
Real-Time
Sales Visibility
50%
Report Gen Time ↓
Power BI
Core Platform

The Challenge

Reporting was fragmented across legacy Excel sheets, manual extracts, and disconnected systems. Leadership lacked real-time sales visibility, and analysts spent 60% of their time on data preparation rather than analysis. Monthly reports took 3–5 days to produce.

🔧

Our Solution

We migrated the entire reporting infrastructure to Power BI with scalable server architecture, built Python + Selenium automation for data extraction workflows, and created a suite of real-time dashboards covering sales, inventory, operations, and regional performance.

📈

The Impact

Manual reporting effort reduced by 30%. Sales leadership gained instant access to real-time operational data. Monthly reports now auto-generate in minutes, not days. Forecast accuracy improved through SKU-level granular analysis and automated variance tracking.

Sales Performance
Command Center

Executive-level sales overview with regional breakdown, YTD performance, and inventory health — refreshed every 15 minutes from live data feeds.

Phoenix Solutions — Automotive Sales Intelligence · Power BI · Last refresh: Today 10:22 AM
📊 Sales Overview
🗺️ Regional Map
📦 Inventory
🔮 Forecast
⚙️ Operations
📋 Reports
YTD 2024
Q4 2024
All Regions
All Models
Updated: Today 10:22 AM · Auto-refresh ON
Units Sold YTD
48,291
↑ 12.4% vs prior year
Revenue YTD
$4.2B
↑ 8.7% vs target
Avg Deal Value
$34,850
→ Flat vs Q3
Inventory Days
18 Days
↓ 5 from Q3
Monthly Sales Volume — Units (Jan–Dec 2024)
Units Peak
5k 4k 3k 2k 1k 0
3.2k
2.8k
3.6k
4.1k
3.8k
4.6k
4.4k
5.1k
4.8k
5.3k
4.5k
5.5k
J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
Sales Mix by Vehicle Type
45%
SUV
SUV
45%
Sedan
35%
Truck
20%

Measurable Impact
from Day One

30%
Reduction in manual reporting effort through Python automation
50%
Faster report generation — from days to minutes
14%
Improvement in forecast accuracy via SKU-level analysis
28%
Downtime reduction through improved Agile workflow visibility

Operations & Supply
Chain Monitoring

Operations Dashboard
98.4%
System Uptime
2,847
Active Work Orders
LIVE
Data Refresh
18 Days
Avg Inventory

Regional Performance
Breakdown

Phoenix Solutions — Regional Sales Analytics · Dealer Network View
Northeast Region
12,847
↑ 18.2%
Midwest Region
15,204
↑ 9.8%
South Region
11,890
↓ 2.1%
West Region
8,350
↑ 24.5%
ModelUnits SoldRevenuevs TargetTrendStatus
CR-V9,824$412M+14%↑↑On Track
Civic8,291$189M+8%On Track
Silverado7,445$356M-3%Watch
Pilot5,902$298M+2%On Track
Equinox4,821$148M-8%At Risk

Technologies
Deployed

📊
Power BI
Dashboard architecture, DAX modeling, report server deployment
🐍
Python + Selenium
Workflow automation, data extraction, ETL pipeline engineering
🗄️
SQL Server
Data warehouse design, stored procedures, query optimization
☁️
Azure
Scalable server architecture, cloud data flows, report deployment
Power BI DesktopDAXPower Query (M)Python 3.xSelenium WebDriverSQL Server 2019Azure Data FactoryPyWin32PandasAgile / Scrum

How It Was
Actually Built

The migration began where these projects usually have to begin: with the reports themselves. Legacy Excel and Access reporting had accumulated years of embedded business logic — lookup tables, manual adjustments and rules that existed nowhere except in a formula. Before any of it could move to Power BI, that logic had to be extracted, documented and agreed, because migrating an undocumented calculation simply relocates the problem.

The data layer was rebuilt on SQL Server 2019 with Azure Data Factory orchestrating scheduled extraction from source systems. Where a system exposed no usable interface, Python with Selenium WebDriver and PyWin32 automated the retrieval that staff had been doing by hand — an unglamorous but decisive part of the work, since a dashboard refreshing automatically against a manually-produced file is not automated at all.

On top of that sits the Power BI semantic model: a star schema with DAX measures defined once and reused across every report, rather than each report carrying its own version of 'units sold'. That single decision is what makes regional and executive views reconcile without argument, and it is the most common thing missing from dashboards we are asked to repair.

How an Engagement
Like This Runs

Phase 1
Discovery & Scoping
Source systems mapped, metric definitions agreed, and the decisions the system has to support written down before anything is built.
Phase 2
Data Layer
Pipelines, transformations and the governed model — the part that determines whether everything above it is trustworthy.
Phase 3
Dashboard Build
Views built with the people who will use them, validated against the reports they replace.
Phase 4
Handover
Documentation, training and a model the internal team can extend without calling us back for every change.

What We Would
Do Differently

Every engagement teaches something. These are the decisions we would change if we started this one again.

The semantic model should have come before the first dashboard, not alongside it. Building visuals while measure definitions were still being agreed meant some early reports had to be rebuilt once the canonical definitions landed.

We would also front-load the browser-automation work. It was treated as a secondary integration task, but it turned out to sit on the critical path — no amount of modelling progress mattered while a source still depended on someone downloading a file each morning.

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