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How to advance quality practices in the automotive industry with advanced analytics

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I’ve been sharing how today’s technology advances have created a rich set of capabilities to help automakers obsess over the customer experience and advance the quality organization over the lifecycle of a product or services experience.

I first talked about the power of cloud innovations, and now I want to turn to the important advancements in analytics capabilities. When combined, they are creating opportunities that were unachievable until now.

Capability #2: Advanced analytics

This advance in analytics capabilities is here today through machine learning and predictive analytics, and is changing how companies deploy such insight tools across their organization. Making sets of algorithms available in the cloud is democratizing analytics, reducing the dependency on you having data scientists, and putting the tools into the hands of the functional experts that need the insight.

These include tools for streaming analytics, machine learning and data visualization. Their capabilities enable businesses to look at data on the move to identify exceptions or trends, create predictive models based on real data, and make it easy for patterns and anomalies to be recognized.

Inside Microsoft, these tools increasingly underpin all of our decision-making, whether related to products and services, our internal operations, or our customers and suppliers. With our Xbox gaming franchise Halo, for example, we use this power to collect real-time telemetry data from game play, and use that data to understand player behavior and user preferences.

Those insights help us improve the gaming experience, making weekly tweaks to the game, and even spot trends that enable us to prevent cheating and maintain a level playing field for all our gaming customers.

In the automotive world, bringing together the new capabilities of cloud computing with a new generation of analytics tools make it possible to combine real-world data with simulation data to increase the accuracy and predictability of a design outcome, at speeds previously not possible.

To consider how this could impact vehicle quality, check out The North American Eagle team as they attempt to break the current land-speed world record in their jet-powered, cloud-connected rocket car. Take a look at this video to see it in action.

In my next post, I will talk about taking that connectivity and analytics to a willing consumer, and building a community with the customer that can directly impact product and quality innovation. In the meantime, you can learn more about how Microsoft’s recent intelligent cloud advancements can accelerate innovation for manufacturers here.

LinkedIn: Chris Harries

Twitter: @chrisharauto