Collaboration empowers automotive industry suppliers with informed, confident business decisions for unprecedented speed, accuracy, and insight to improve profitability.
Campfire Interactive, Inc. (Campfire), the leading provider of portfolio profitability management in the automotive sector, announced a strategic relationship today with Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company. Through the collaboration, Campfire will provide automotive businesses around the world with an end-to-end solution to unlock profit potential within a highly reliable, scalable, cost-effective, cloud-based infrastructure platform.
Automotive suppliers grapple with complex business problems while creating, managing, and executing profitability plans. New and ongoing vehicle programs combined with supply chain and production-related issues are among many challenges that must be proactively managed. Developing forecasts and determining the relationship of volume, cost, pricing, and capacity are slowed by a collection of non-integrated, manually produced worksheets created to produce business financial models and reports. Consequently, companies waste time and resources assessing changing business needs to understand how critical, key financial metrics such as profit, return on investment, and market share are trending at any given stage.
The Campfire and AWS collaboration changes all of this. Campfire will apply AWS’s broadest and deepest portfolio of purpose-built, cloud-native services and power next-generation automotive industry solutions. The resulting solutions will deliver on the promise of operational agility, addressing customer security, uptime, and service.
Campfire has begun integrating Amazon SageMaker (AWS’s service that makes it easier to build, train, deploy custom machine learning models at scale) and reporting/dashboards into its software, with additional technologies to follow. Work is also underway to accelerate the modernization of business-critical applications using serverless and container services to achieve maximum agility and reduce the total cost of ownership.
Advancing Profitability
The engagement provides Campfire with proven machine learning capabilities and advanced reporting/dashboard technologies. Additionally, Campfire will gain access to AWS resources and programs including best practices, the AWS Foundational Technical Review to promote solutions, and other assistance to help modernize its existing solutions.
“Campfire customers, like automotive suppliers who migrate to the AWS cloud, will see significant advancements in terms of capabilities, performance, and analysis,” said Pradeep Seneviratne, President and CEO, Campfire. “Machine learning technology will provide unprecedented business insights to support faster and more cost-efficient decision-making. The results will be much more accurate and predictable, and, in many cases, impossible to achieve without the technology.”
As cloud computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence take on increasingly critical roles for manufacturers, software providers must respond with best-in-class enabling technologies – whether developed in-house or through strategic partnerships.
“Our goal is to empower the Campfire user community with industry-leading technology, and we recognize the importance of integrating the expertise and resources of our partners in making this happen,” said Seneviratne. “With unmatched resources, proven experience, and a commitment to the automotive sector, AWS is a natural fit to collaborate with Campfire. We believe in AWS technology and are working to fully leverage its capabilities to move us to new levels of cloud computing and reporting much faster than we could expect to get there on our own.”
“The anticipated rebound in vehicle sales following the pandemic will influence demand and order volatility. Improved visibility of market conditions and their effects on production volumes and capacity will give auto suppliers a better understanding about the cost of a business opportunity,” said Bill Foy, Director of Automotive, AWS. “Accurate forecasting is both a priority and a necessity for automotive customers. An engagement with Campfire reflects a customer commitment to accuracy and insight for a supplier’s financial, engineering, and sales organizations, and Campfire can rely on AWS for the insights and agility it needs to continue leading in the automotive supplier market.”
Optimizing the Customer Experience
Working together, the Campfire and AWS solution allows suppliers to quickly surface vast amounts of data and review key financial information such as optimal cost, price, and volume throughout the extended enterprise. Users can create, analyze, and modify plans, run scenarios, optimize portfolios, and manage long-term profitability models to produce critical financial metrics and insights.
Accounting for all data produced by costing and pricing functionality, suppliers model variables such as volume, material, customer type, and geography to determine customer impact while optimizing profitability. The result is a profitability management platform allowing business executives and analysts to focus on value-added data modeling, analysis, and insights rather than data entry, extraction, and maintenance.
With locations spanning more than 25 countries, Joyson Safety Systems (Auburn Hills, MI) is a leading provider of safety-critical components, systems, and technology. Like many other suppliers, the company has grown through a series of acquisitions and mergers.
“We have successfully deployed Campfire’s forecasting solution in the past,” said Nathan Rajen, Global Head of Technology, Strategy and Solutions, Joyson Safety Systems. “But Campfire’s engagement with Amazon opens the door to more fully leverage the software along with integrated ML and AI on a global scale. This will help standardize global business planning and allow us to optimize our use of data and resources, resulting in a greater advantage over competitors and a measurable impact on profitability.”
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