Piston Intelligence: Orchestrating Intelligent Business Decisions

When it comes to the launch of a new vehicle, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) have many questions about the most effective approach to price a vehicle on the market? What are the most appropriate price positions to be considered to fulfill consumer demands?

Historically, the price was determined by a company’s executive board by taking into account results from clinic studies (a small sampled survey) and a range of factors from their own point of view, not from customers’ perspectives. They often don’t comprehend that buyers are only concerned with how much they want to pay, not with the cost of the vehicle or the improvements made over the vehicle’s previous generation. With a large amount of automotive product and market related data accessible, businesses need to understand a host of factors to arrive at the optimal pricing that satisfies both the OEM and the buyer.

Over the years, massive amounts of data have been gathered, particularly with the development of alternative energy vehicles. However, attempts to analyze, filter, and extract usable information from data sets that are too vast to manage using traditional computation have failed. The majority of the time, OEMs are unsure how to use this information. Adding to the woes of huge datasets in any business is the fact that data is generally housed in different organizations, systems and formats, resulting in redundant and misleading data. In a nutshell, the silo problem looms greater with big data making data processing a challenge. If the data is viewed without considering data governance, big data can be deceptive in decision-making. Additionally, in today’s environment, merely having data is not enough; it is critical to understand the what, why, and how of the data that is available in the business decision-making process.

With more than two decades of global experience in analytics and leadership in both new and used, retail, and fleet markets in the automotive industry, Rose Peng recognized a need for a company that can bring value of interconnected data and data-out-of-data to businesses and their decision-makers. This led her to lay the cornerstone of Piston Intelligence, a leading decision intelligence (DI) company focused on integrating applied data science, social science, and managerial science into decision making.
“We can be a driving force in providing more comprehensive, valuable and insightful services that enable businesses to make decisions that are not only wiser, but also more efficient,” says Rose, founder of Piston Intelligence.

Under the Hood of Excellence

By providing a highly integrated big data system, Piston Intelligence is able to deliver full vehicle lifecycle management solutions and products that can help businesses and OEMs cope with the complexity of making significant decisions.

Piston Intelligence employs an intelligent Product Competitiveness Index (PCI) system, which assesses the pricing power of vehicle exterior styling, interior spaciousness, comfort, equipment, drive experience, service quality, etc. and stacks it against the market competition to forecast the market demand curve of the tobe-launched vehicle assisting OEMs in determining the appropriatepricing position.

The intelligent pricing system incorporates all critical elements influencing consumers’ willingness to pay into the modelling, enabling all stakeholders to understand the monetized impact of each component individually. This comprehensive method based on big data analytics has made pricing decision-making far more efficient and factual. “We can provide a value added service so that businesses can make pricing decisions based on their own operational objectives, whether its profit margins or the sales volume they wish to pursue,” says Rose.

While the company aims to facilitate better and more efficient business decisions, its products and service have always been consumer and market-centric, as the company prioritizes customer preferences and market feedbackbased decisions. Piston Intelligence accomplishes this by combining superior technology and flexible platform architecture that helps in providing a more holistic approach to problem-solving

Rose believes that the use of advanced and robust technical capabilities in data processing governance, DI analytics, and IT architecture in addition to expertise in global business applications are what distinguishes Piston Intelligence in the market today. She highlights Piston Intelligence’s prowess by outlining two occasions where the company exceeded its clients’ expectations. As Piston Intelligence collects data from several data sources, each with its naming scheme, mapping plays a critical role in interconnecting the data. On one occasion, Piston Intelligence employed ensemble learning based on a set of business rules, neural networks, and XGboost to create a mapping algorithm that is 60,000 times faster than a highly trained analyst. This approach also yielded a 99 percent mapping success rate, which is highly significant to customers. In yet another instance, the company developed an intelligent used vehicle pricing system for a client. By employing the DI algorithm, the company swiftly identified the ideal used vehicle price from over 960 million choices among 16 nameplates. It not only enhanced profit margins by more than three percentage points per vehicle and considerably improved operational efficiency but it also laid the groundwork for the company’s large-scale operational development.

Building on a Legacy

With a strong value proposition already in place in the automotive industry, Rose is eager to expand into other sectors by leveraging the company’s expertise in data governance and decision intelligence. With the ultimate objective of addressing and resolving real-world business difficulties, the company intends to provide true value to its clients in all fields in the foreseeable future. On that note, Rose also sheds light on a charitable organization where sophisticated Piston technology is already being employed for data digitization. By employing a natural language processing (NLP) approach, Piston Intelligence efficiently analysed and extracted insights from the large amount of feedback in the form of unstructured recordings and write-ups from schools, students, and parents.
The company has also recently expanded into the energy sector, where it will work on boosting the system efficiency of one of China’s largest energy organizations. With several such accomplishments under their belt, Piston Intelligence, as a robust, resilient, and versatile company, is on the right track to make larger contributions to the worldwide economy