Leveraging BMW fleet data for customer integration in product development

Automotive manufacturers need to foster product and business model innovation to stay competitive. The key to innovative processes is the tight integration of customers into product and business model development. Current approaches to customer integration are mostly based on market research that only considers customers’ intention to use. These approaches neglect the potential of actual usage data for guiding cost-intensive product and business model development. In this study, we developed a new patented method to utilize customer usage data to determine parking scenarios that can guide automotive manufacturers to develop customer value-oriented parking assistance functions. The approach was evaluated on 284 million parking global positioning system positions in three major automotive markets, namely, the European Union, the United States of America, and China. Furthermore, we analyzed the influencing factors for parking behavior depending on the market, population density, and time of the day. Our findings can help classify different types of parking behavior that automotive manufacturers can use and integrate real-world data-driven insights into the product development process. The advantages of integrating customer usage data in the product development process were examined and demonstrated based on examples from the automotive industry. Our findings will motivate manufacturers to develop more customer-oriented parking assistance functions and better allocate development resources.