| | MARCH 20228THE CHANGING DYNAMICS OF AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY Prakash Kumar, Head of IT, BMW India, shares his thoughts on how the automotive industry is evolving from a technology implementation standpoint, the challenges involved, and how they can be addressed. In terms of new technology adoption, how do you see the current automotive industry and what are the major factors driving the implementation of disruptive technologies? Automotive industry is actually going through a very big change. What has not been seen in the last 100 years is happening now. Especially, in the last couple of years, we have witnessed several changes because of the digital interventions. One is of course, the electric mobility which is going to bring a lot of changes. And the second thing which is bringing a lot of changes is digital intervention. A car per se is no longer just an IC engine; it is becoming more and more electric and the number of components is going to go down drastically. So, it will not be a very specialized technology, it could become a commodity. The services and the features which will be bought by the car companies will actually differentiate them from the competitors and that is where big opportunities will emerge which will bring more and more digital instruments. What do you think is the most prominent challenge that the pandemic has thrown up for the automotive CIOs? One of the biggest challenges is on the customer front. Traditionally, automotive industry has been running through the dealers. But in the new scenario, especially post Covid-19, customers increasingly prefer the service to be more virtual. That's where a pretty big change is happening. Officially there are 300-400 different touch points from where the customer is coming in. All these touch points need to be integrated such that it becomes more virtual. So, departing from a physical experience of sale and service, the online mode is now being preferred. When it comes to manufacturing, we are seeing a lot of metrics and IoT interventions coming in. So, the manufacturing is becoming more and more robotics driven, although slightly less in India right now. But over a period of time I see this moving towards a level where entire manufacturing would be driven by robots, akin to European countries. A lot of IoT devices are coming into manufacturing and predictive modeling is being used more. So, these are the places where we are seeing a lot of digital intervention. With the industry becoming more and more competitive, companies are relying highly on the data. So, they are trying to capture all structured and unstructured data around the customer. Earlier they were only capturing the data which perhaps was around the car, but now the scope has widened to capturing the consumer behavior. 360 degree view of the customer interactions are being tracked and the data is being used for starting from the finding out whether a particular lead is likely to mature or not, or what is the propensity Prakash Kumar, Head - ITVANTAGE POINT
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