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Automotive
The Jean-Michel Martin Group has seen its profits maximized thanks to the TARGIT BI tool

About the company
The Jean-Michel Martin Group is a BMW/Mini and Land Rover/Jaguar dealership that serves Brussels and the surrounding area. Its success is partly due to the size of its fleet market in the capital. A great many companies are established in the city, and the Jean-Michel Martin Group has had the pleasure of meeting all their motoring needs since 1993. This success has led to the development of a strong brand encompassing a total of 13 companies.
Their Challenges
  • The Jean-Michel Martin Group needed visibility into non-accounting data, so they could better measure performance and profitability
  • They also needed to obtain and analyze this data more regularly, as they were currently only creating quarterly reports
  • Finally, the group was looking for an analytics solution that was intuitive enough for their non-technical teams.
How we helped
  • Provided the Jean-Michel Martin Group with complete visibility into their operations via automatic reports and dashboards
  • Enabled employees to analyze data every 1-2 weeks instead of their previous quarterly cadence
  • Helped increase overall profitability by equipping employees with new insights and key performance indicators (KPIs). 
TARGIT has enabled us to increase profitability, and this, in turn, allows us to invest in the future. Because in business, if you don’t go forward every day, you go backward every day.
- Thierry Kin, Finance Director, The Jean-Michel Martin Group

The Challenges

Despite a longstanding record of growth and strong brand presence in Belgium, the Jean-Michel Martin Group's gross profit margin began to decline in recent years. 

The Jean-Martin Michel Group worked mainly with accounting data in the context of relationships with importers and general reporting. This does not of course make it possible to have an overview of the company, given that non-accounting data also constitutes a crucial factor, especially when the issue is to identify the core problem with profitability.

 

Finding a Solution

Finance Director Thierry Kin was searching for a way to clearly identify the reasons for the decline in the gross profit margin. In this context, while attending a conference organized by Carya, BMW’s IT service provider, he met Luc Cos, Director of TARGIT Automotive. The Finance Director of the Jean-Michel Martin Group describes how their relationship got off the ground: “Initially I felt the tool was too complex for us. But Luc Cos redoubled his efforts with figures from other BMW dealerships. And we were fortunate to be sponsored by BMW, in a manner of speaking. That’s how we started working together.”

 

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Implementation

Given that Carya, BMW’s official computer program provider, was already working with TARGIT, the business intelligence (BI) tool was implemented smoothly. In fact, the Jean-Michel Martin Group was able to take advantage of the experience acquired by other BMW dealerships. Any problems that had arisen and been resolved with these other dealerships helped with the implementation of this easy-to-use solution, particularly by focusing on presales, including invoice tracking.

 

In Practice

Previously, the Jean-Michel Martin Group was based on BMW reporting. This is quarterly reporting for analysis purposes, but the resulting analysis is not really current because a report like this takes four months. This means in effect that no decision can be made before six months.

Thanks to TARGIT’s unique solution, today it is possible to identify within one or two weeks if any changes have been made to action plans and following decisions taken. The responsiveness and ease of use of automatic reporting mean that crucial information can be obtained while focusing on other problems.

“The TARGIT solution has enabled us to obtain non-accounting data automatically, which means that we can anticipate events and make targeted improvements,” explains Thierry Kin, Finance Director of the group.

Thanks to the IT decision-support solution provided by TARGIT, the Jean-Michel Martin Group has achieved real gains in time and money. By improving profitability, the group can invest in new projects. “If you don’t invest on a continuous basis, sooner or later you get swallowed up by a competitor,” Thierry Kin explains.

TARGIT's BI tool has made it possible for the group to identify new KPIs that positively influence profitability.

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Collaboration

Encouraged by this first success, TARGIT and the Jean-Michel Martin Group are working even more closely together and thereby creating a situation that benefits everybody. TARGIT uses all this data to create a sort of dashboard where all the dealerships analyze their sales, presales, etc. The Jean-Michel Martin Group dreams of full reporting – a dream that is now coming true thanks to TARGIT.

Originally published May 22, 2023. Updated May 27, 2024