In 2016, Dealer Tire executives posed a salient question to the 100-year-old company’s fledgling data science team: Can we predict when each consumer will need tires? The answer — critical for a company that must get to customers before they buy tires somewhere else — was a resounding yes.
“It was the first ‘a-ha’ moment,” Chris Schron, Dealer Tire’s director of data science, tells CIO.com. “We realized if we could build some predictive models to answer that question, it could really add value.”