When originally incepted, the team’s mission was tactical: reduce the risk of operational Looker dashboards. To date, the Ops Insight team has built six dashboards for the UK. While other operational Looker dashboards exists, the very high priority dashboards have been de-risked, and we believe it is a business imperative now to focus on building the foundations for Cazoo’s inventory management capabilities, with the long-term impact of driving an increase in margin.
The group has five key objectives for 2022/23, three of which roll-up from a foundation of inventory management capabilities:
The dashboards which Ops Insight have built to date support specific teams which are working to directly impact one or more of these group objectives. We believe that new tools, which cut across multiple teams, will be required for Cazoo to reach it’s full operational potential, and thus allow us to achieve the margin and operating efficiencies required for long-term profitability.
<aside> 🤔 This sounds suspiciously like an inventory management system. In a business environment as complex as Cazoo’s, no one team can provide a full suite of tools which make up an inventory management system (entire companies are built on this, like SAP), but, we believe one team can create a tool which helps business users manage the efficiency of the supply chain.
</aside>
The Vehicle Lifecycle Management (VLM) team is the recognition of the fact that our supply chain process—how we purchase cars, deliver them to production, produce, publish, sell, and deliver cars to customers—is the results of many complex activities which can only occur when multiple teams carry out their discrete activities in symphony, allowing the entire process to flow most efficiently.
<aside> 📣 Our objective is: to be the source of truth for the end-to-end efficiency of our inventory in process.
Our mission is: to support teams with bottleneck identification, resource re-allocation, and capacity enhancement, ultimately driving efficiency and profitability across the lifecycle.
</aside>
<aside> 💰 Our impact is : Reducing average lead time from acquisition (purchase) to publish by 1 day would save almost £1m/year (based on 2022 target publishing volumes)
</aside>
<aside> 🦸♂️ Our superusers are the product right now. Our superusers are the only people that can answer the question: "We know what a vehicle is, where it is, what needs to happen next to the vehicle, and where it needs to go."
</aside>
<aside> 1️⃣ Primary users are dependent on the superusers today, we want to remove this dependency. Primary users are either in front of vehicles completing tasks to progress the vehicle or need to know the history of the vehicle (the tasks that have been completed) to support a preparing a vehicle for a Customer.
</aside>
<aside> 2️⃣ Secondary users benefit from the data analysis that will be derived from Vehicle Lifecycle Management. The correct mapping of our supply chain will allow us to understand where the biggest opportunities are in the business. Secondary users will be served by VLM and Data.
</aside>
⃝ = No. of users
The Inventory Management’s teams ‘North Star’ Metric is the automatic publishing rate, which is a calculation of the number of vehicles which are published ‘automatically’ on the day in which production is completed (imaging complete). In order for a vehicle to be published automatically, all the ‘Publish Checks’ must pass (list of publish checks is here). The Inventory Management Team, along with the Ops Admin Team, work in parallel with production in order to make a vehicle publishing ready (visualisation of these parallel work activities is here).
