Air Bag Complaints, Quickly Understood
Issue
General Motors was receiving complaints relating to the air bag in one of its vehicles. GM needed to be able to investigate if those issues were related to one specific make, model and model year, and/or to determine how widespread the issue really was. GM also wanted to learn if there were complaints gathered by NHTSA that would potentially present cause to initiate an investigation.
The Datrato Solution
Absent of Datrato, the only course of action would be to go to the NHTSA website and manually run one individual report for each model year/make/model combination, gather that data, and finally analyze it all. Unfortunately, General Motors has 922 different combinations of make and model. If the data were to be requested for the last 10 model years, there could be more than 9,200 different combinations to perform searches against and sort through. The requisite hours and financial burden to perform the task of data collection of this magnitude is overwhelming.
Further adding to the arduous nature of the undertaking and the corresponding labor costs, the NHTSA website does not allow a user to search based on keywords, meaning the user would also need to first download the data, then manually search for the keywords to identify the relevant information. Ultimately, after spending months to collect the data, and prior to any meaningful analysis being able to be performed, the team tasked with this project is not much further ahead than when they started.
But Datrato did all of this—and more—in seconds, not months.
Results: Datrato Makes it Simple
Using the Datrato system, GM was able to collect the detailed information in just a few moments. Almost instantaneously, their analysts were able to:
- Create a complaint keyword search request
- Specify customizable parameters over the last 10 model years
- Specify the keyword variations that needed to be searched (e.g., ‘air bag,’ ‘airbag,’ ‘air-bag,’ etc.)
- Click on a single button to view and analyze all of the relevant information and reports
Figure 1: Complaint Search Screen
Datrato proved that there is no faster way to get from data to analysis, and ultimately to intelligence. The Datrato system provided GM complete, detailed reports for all of the manufacturer’s air-bag-related complaints, while visually highlighting keywords to make the data easier to read and comprehend. The system allows the user to further filter the data for additional keywords with just a few more clicks. Ultimately, Datrato allows the user to look at the data in a clear, easy-to-understand graphical format, which allows the user to analyze the data in just a few ticks of the clock and clicks of a mouse.