Customer Story

Driven Brands Modernizes Their Analytics Platform to Accelerate Company-Wide Growth  

Goal

Driven Brands is focused on increasing their market share, while also prioritizing the development of co-branding opportunities and providing increased value to franchisees. To achieve these goals, Driven Brands needs reliable and timely financials to understand the contribution of each brand, the profitability of franchises, as well as customer behavior across the business. This includes access to data that can provide visibility into:

  • Customer behavior around attrition and retention, preferences, and purchasing habits
  • Franchisee behavior and value, including performance metrics, compliance, and satisfaction
  • Marketing effectiveness such as ROI and campaign success
  • Co-branding success and partnership opportunities

With access to this data, Driven Brands can make informed decisions to drive growth and success in all areas of the business.

Problem

Business units across Driven Brands had varying levels of data and analytics maturity. There wasn’t a standard, centralized way to handle data across their brands, divisions, and franchises, and the absence of a solid data strategy and foundation made it difficult to maintain consistency and reliability of their data. As a result, they could not get the insights they needed to run the business.

More specifically, Driven Brands experienced challenges with:

  • Defending unreliable financials due to the time constraints in getting raw numbers from their financial reporting systems.
  • Aging data architecture which was capturing too much business logic in their BI tool (Qlik) instead of their data warehouse (BigQuery). They were also challenged with marrying data from eight different point-of-sale system brands, each implemented in different ways.
  • Lack of a unified approach in measuring the performance of all brands. They needed a better way to integrate and understand key metrics across their multiple business units and acquired companies.
  • Lack of insight into the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. They could not see data across their brands, divisions, and franchises — making it difficult to gauge the effectiveness of co-branding opportunities and marketing campaigns.
  • Ad-hoc reporting — most of their reports were operational, not analytical. They were treating business intelligence as an ad-hoc, on-demand service — leading to little trust in the data and its quality.

To address these challenges, Driven Brands sought help with stabilizing and modernizing their entire data and analytics environment, establishing internal processes, and migrating from a legacy tool to a more modern platform.

Solution

Analytics8 worked with Driven Brands to upgrade and modernize their analytics capabilities across multiple business units — Carwash; Repair and Maintenance; Paint, Collision, and Glass; Platform Services; and Corporate — and implemented central tools that spanned the company.

To address the immediate needs of specific business units and bring them fast time-to-value, we put in place a data team that included data engineers and data analysts who worked to improve processes and glean immediate insights necessary for daily operations.

In addition to operating as data team for Driven Brands, we also helped in many unique ways including:

  • Migrated disparate on-premises Qlik environments to a singular Qlik SaaS platform, allowing for stability in performance.
  • Redesigned the extract and transformation layer; implementing best practices around scripting, handling dates, and user-interfaces; organizing the newly created spaces; and implementing security measures and processes to ensure SoX compliance.
  • Provided enhancements in existing Qlik reports, building up to providing the company more analytics and self-service capability.
  • Implemented Agile project management, organizing their workflow, and developing best practices across the entire Qlik environment — leading to improved data quality across the business.
  • Created dashboards for 16 brands providing KPIs from all brands for the executive team.
  • Performed RFM customer segmentation on a new e-commerce site, which gave visibility into user behaviors and ideas on strategic decisions.
  • Trained employees to ensure they can maintain their systems and make informed decisions based on their data.

Throughout the engagement, we evolved the team as each unit progressed, meeting them at their current level, and making progress in parallel via different business unit needs.

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Results

Our solution for Driven Brands involved working across multiple divisions and brands, unifying data for improved analytics, while also addressing the specific needs of each brand. Our approach included implementing best practices to provide consistent user experience, accurate reporting, and reliable information for governed self-service.

We provided multiple dashboards that offered Driven Brands more insight into their acquisitions, along with several other benefits, including:

  • Increased confidence in the reported data
  • More efficient analytics reporting that follow best practices
  • Solid infrastructure for BI development that was flexible and agile to handle changing business needs
  • Additional self-service functionality with SaaS self-service features
  • Consistency in reporting and analytics delivery

With updated and modernized analytics capabilities, Driven Brands can now make informed decisions based on reliable data, leading to increased revenue and a more competitive business.

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About the Company

Driven Brands is the largest automotive services company in North America, headquartered in Charlotte, NC, with more than 4,300 centers across 15 countries. They are the parent company of several leading businesses — Take 5 Oil Change, Meineke Car Care Centers, Maaco, 1-800-Radiator & A/C, and CARSTAR — offering a range of consumer and commercial automotive services, including paint, collision, glass, vehicle repair, oil change, maintenance, and car wash and generating approximately $1 billion in revenue from more than $3 billion in system-wide sales.

With a mission to be the best automotive franchise in the world, Driven Brands has a relentless focus on innovation and growth. While they value boldness, meritocracy, inclusivity, integrity, as well as fun, their overarching goal is to provide exceptional customer service, offering high-quality, reliable, and affordable automotive services.

Driven Brands’ commitment to growth and innovation has helped establish them as a leader in the industry, servicing more than 50 million vehicles annually. Their dedication to excellence and customer satisfaction ensures that they will continue to be a major player in the automotive services industry for years to come — especially as they continue the growth trajectory they are on.

Driven Brands is the largest automotive services company in North America, headquartered in Charlotte, NC, with more than 4,300 centers across 15 countries. They are the parent company of several leading businesses — Take 5 Oil Change, Meineke Car Care Centers, Maaco, 1-800-Radiator & A/C, and CARSTAR — offering a range of consumer and commercial automotive services, including paint, collision, glass, vehicle repair, oil change, maintenance, and car wash and generating approximately $1 billion in revenue from more than $3 billion in system-wide sales.

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