Context
Saga Moto Yamaha is a large Yamaha dealership group in Central Brazil, with locations in Goiânia, Anápolis and Brasília. Like most dealerships in Brazil, it runs on an ERP/DMS (Dealer Management System) that is the heart of the business: inventory, sales, after-sales, workshop, parts, finance, everything goes through it.
ProdMan was brought in for a pain that looked specific. Leadership wanted to use data to support decisions. Dashboards, indicators, a business-wide view. The brief was about analytics.
We started where you start: understanding where the data comes from. That is when the real problem showed up.
The diagnosis that changed the project
Saga's ERP had been built by a local company that was closing its doors. Before long, the system running the entire operation would be left with no support and no roadmap, with no chance of meeting the demands the business was already making of it.
It was a double pain. The current ERP was already frozen in time, with several business needs unmet, and management had been postponing the migration debate for later. But later had arrived. The company behind the system was about to disappear, and Saga would be left alone with frozen technology.
Replacing an ERP is not a simple decision. It involves the whole operation, the staff, vendors, integrations, processes built over years. That is why it kept being postponed. But postponing it further was not an option.
Staying on the data problem and pretending the ERP was not the real issue would have been doing the wrong thing beautifully. ProdMan reopened the conversation with leadership and repositioned the scope: the data project went to the back of the queue. What had to happen first was the full mapping of the operation and the preparation of the system migration.
The approach, on three fronts
The work was structured on three fronts that moved in parallel, with priorities set together with leadership.
Front 1: Sourcing and selecting the new DMS
Assessment of modern market solutions that met Saga's real requirements. Analysis of vendors, technical capability of the product, financial health of the company behind it (precisely to avoid the trap of the previous ERP), total cost of ownership and fit with the dealership's processes. Native capability to deliver reliable data, with clear links between data, process steps and reports, went into the selection criteria, addressing the original analytics pain that had opened the project. Leadership received a well-founded choice, with explicit pros and cons, not a recommendation pushed by vendor marketing.
Front 2: Full process mapping
In-depth interviews with managers from every area: sales, after-sales, workshop, parts, administration, finance, IT. End-to-end mapping of each process, business rules documented, exceptions identified, integrations with other systems designed. The kind of assessment a dealership rarely stops to do, and which becomes the mandatory foundation for any system migration to work without losing the operation along the way.
Front 3: Specification for the implementation team
Everything mapped became structure in Jira. Organization created, backlog built, scopes described, rules and requirements documented at task level. The final deliverable was a complete implementation package, ready to be used by the new DMS technical team whenever Saga decided to execute the switch.
- The real problem diagnosed before it turned into a fire: the ERP had an expiration date, it was not merely outdated
- Complete documentation of the operation's processes, material that did not exist anywhere before
- New DMS selected under rigorous technical criteria, already solving the original analytics and data reliability pain at the source
- Requirements package structured in Jira, ready for direct handoff to the new DMS implementation team
- Autonomy preserved: Saga chose the timing of the migration around its own fiscal cycle, without depending on an outside consultancy to execute it
Why this case matters
This is the case that proves ProdMan's positioning in concrete form. It is not an AI case. It was not sold as an AI case. It was sold to solve a business pain, and the business pain changed during the diagnosis. When that happens, an honest consultant repositions the scope. They do not keep pushing the solution already agreed on just to hit a delivery target.
The hard part of consulting inside a real operation is not executing. It is seeing. Saga had a stated pain and a real pain, and those two sat at different levels. The work started by solving the stated one and ended by delivering a plan to solve the one at the root.
When ProdMan left, Saga was left with the capability to run the migration at the right time, with a vendor chosen on criteria and complete requirements in hand. And with a far more elegant solution than the original scope anticipated: the analytics pain that opened the project was already addressed inside the DMS they chose. Two birds, one stone. That is consulting that respects the operation already running and gives autonomy back, not dependency.