Case Study: Cox Automotive achieves 54% vendor ROI and smarter reconditioning decisions with Tableau Software

Cox Automotive understands millions of data points with Tableau, Cloudera, & Azure

Cox Automotive, which aggregates more than 3 million used-vehicle transactions a year, needed to consolidate wholesale and retail data to deliver actionable insights and to convince vendors to invest in vehicle reconditioning to boost auction resale prices. The challenge was turning vast, streaming website and inspection data into a simple, presales tool that sales teams could use on phones and tablets to make the commercial case to leasing companies and manufacturers.

By connecting Tableau directly to a Cloudera Hadoop cluster hosted in Microsoft Azure, Cox built a solution that analyzes inspection reports, estimates repair costs and recommends reconditioning grades for each vehicle. The tool was productized after rapid executive buy-in; vendors now spend an average £82 on reconditioning and gain an average £126 increase in sale price—an average £44 return per vehicle, or a 54% ROI—while keeping a clear focus on commercial value.

Cox Automotive

Allison Nau

Head of Data Intelligence