Air Bag Complaints, Quickly Understood

General Motors was receiving complaints relating to the air bag in one of its vehicles. GM needed to investigate whether the issue was tied to a single make, model, and model year, or how widespread it really was.

GM also wanted to know whether NHTSA-gathered complaints might present cause to initiate an investigation.

Without Datrato, the only option was to run one NHTSA report for every make/model/model-year combination by hand. GM has 922 make/model combinations. Over the last 10 model years, that is more than 9,200 searches to run and sort through.

NHTSA's site offers no keyword search, so the team would also have to download the data and manually search it. After months of collection, they would be barely further ahead than when they started.

In Datrato, GM's analysts collected the detail in moments: create a complaint keyword search, set parameters across the last 10 model years, specify keyword variants ('air bag', 'airbag', 'air-bag'), and click once to view and analyze every relevant report.

Keywords are highlighted for fast comprehension, the data can be filtered further in a few more clicks, and everything is shown in a clear graphical format, proving there is no faster way to get from data to analysis to intelligence.