Carro Taps Into Data To Fuel Performance And Productivity

Singapore-based Carro is one of ASEAN’s fastest growing startups with a valuation of more than $1 billion dollars achieved in 2021. The business’ success stems from a series of innovative services that challenge the traditional way of buying and selling cars. These include Singapore's first contactless online car purchase service, its first car subscription service, and the first region-wide behaviour and usage-based car insurance solutions.

Carro has also developed a proprietary pricing algorithm that determines the most favourable prices for sellers and makes it easier for buyers to search for the best deals.

“We want to make the experience of buying a car online easy, seamless, and worry free. We also want to make the process 100% transparent,” said Zi Yong Chua, Chief Operating Officer, Carro.

The startup is data-driven in its approach to driving performance and growth, with Zi Yong and other executives using Tableau dashboards to inform every decision. The executives are also leading by example to foster a data culture at all levels of the business.

“We can only be data-driven if our employees are data-driven and that comes from helping them understand the value of data. Having a solution like Tableau helps by accelerating our ability to unlock that value and use data to drive better performance,” said Zi Yong. “It also contributes to the overall digitization of our workflow.”

Making insights available at startup pace

Prior to using Tableau, Carro used spreadsheets to manually report on and visualize data. These reports took one to two weeks to prepare and were often prone to error, leading the business to seek out a better and faster way to gain insights.

“Our business is complex and we are always adding new business lines and expanding into new markets. This created a challenge for us in the past as we had to continually recreate reports and visualizations,” said Zi Yong.

As a fast moving startup, Carro adopted Tableau because of its efficiency in delivering insights from data. The implementation coincided with the delivery of a new ERP where Carro has centralized all the data that once resided in spreadsheets. Tableau connects to the ERP, enabling users to surface up-to-the-minute information from across the business.

Reports and visualizations now take one to two days to prepare as opposed to one to two weeks and regular weekly reporting is automated. Executives can also track every aspect of the business. For example, there are dashboards to track return on investment (ROI) for each project and to measure team productivity. Information like inventory levels and adherence to service level agreements (SLAs) are also tracked in near real-time, helping executives make better decisions and optimize team performance

“We’ve built a strong foundation of dashboards that help us to benchmark and drive the efficiency of our operations and expose any gaps or processes to be improved,” said Zi Yong.

The use of Tableau is growing with users including executives across departments such as business intelligence, finance, and human resources. 

The next step for Carro is to empower more of its executives and frontline managers with data to help them make day-to-day decisions.

“We’re now starting to create reports and dashboards that are more relevant to our frontline and motivate them to do more with their data,” said Zi Yong.