(Nikkei BP Group)
(No.1 High-Tech News Site in Japanese)
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| Nissan to Adopt GIS for Building Sales Support System
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January 21, 1999 (TOKYO) -- Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. announced a plan to
start operating a system using geographical information systems (GIS)
for supporting its dealers by March.
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The system is to be used by staff members of a sales planning department
at Nissan's headquarters. They can search and browse facility information
including location data of 3,000 offices nationwide. That data includes
photos of each office and information on repair shops. And they can
also obtain sales data for each office.
"Using this system, Nissan can more easily support dealerships with the
planning of reorganization of office networks and sales promotion,"
said Terumi Koyama, manager of the dealer development and support section
in Nissan's marketing and sales planning department.
The company is installing GIS software as a core of its sales support
system. Specifically, it is installing the client-server edition of
Earth Finder provided by Kokusai Kogyo Co., Ltd.
On the server side, PC servers running Windows NT are used, and the client
side is built up with Windows 95 PCs. Data including office/shop information
is managed with SQL Server from Microsoft Co., Ltd.
Nissan Motor will reportedly increase the number of data items after
launching the new system. Data to be stored in the system will include
location information of agencies affiliated with competing makers and
the number of cars sold in each prefecture.
Also, the company plans to enhance the efficiency of a method of inputting
shop data used in GIS. At present, the data is sent from agencies to
Nissan's headquarters by hard copy once a year, and then it is input
manually. Nissan has been studying a method requiring agencies to input
data directly over the Internet.
In April, Nissan will reorganize its sales line-up along with its product
lines, by cutting the current four lines to two. The company believes
that it must increase the efficiency in planning sales strategies in
accordance with the reorganization.
Additionally, GIS is expected to reduce the work load of configuring
data for strategies of managing shops, to enhance efficiency.
(Nikkei
Computer)
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