Irish Enterprise Awards 2020

10 EU BUSINESS NEWS / 2020 Irish Enterprise Awards , Best Automotive Industry Organisational Software Provider 2020, Digital Technology Services Provider of the Year 2020, Award for Innovation in Risk Management Solutions 2020 Throughout their careers in the automotive industry, the teamat SOAR overcame day-to-day frustrations and inefficiencies. Understanding the acceleratingmove of business towards digitisation, the solutions required, and ready-made market beyond just automotive, they established SOAR. Clients including Allied Irish Banks, NextGear Capital (UK) and V12 Vehicle Finance (UK), who employ their SOAR_inventory “self-audit” product are a testament to their vision. SOAR has recently expanded to leverage the potential power of client and sectoral data. Harnessing data analytics withmachine learning to offer behavioural and predicative modelling services to clients. Following the firm’s win of three awards, join us as we examine its compelling journey to success. Jan20364 According to Sharon Kavanagh Banks CEO, SOAR was founded in 2013 based on the simple principle that “there is a better way”; combined with a certainty the team had the ability to develop and deliver the “the best way”. SOAR’s strive for perfection isn’t a final goal, it is a journey; one that has served them and their clients well so far. Established out of a desire to fix challenges encountered working in the automotive industry, but common to many, “risk and asset management” solutions became their focus. Their enterprise solution would mitigate risk, fill functional gaps while also augmenting and automating processes to deliver efficiencies in any sector necessitating intelligent stringent asset controls. Vitally, it had to be simple to use, and flexible to the requirements of any client! Their answer, a cloud and app based modular solution offering customers the ability to use a single product from the SOAR portfolio, or “bolt on” additional modules to implement a single supplier multi-discipline solution across their organisations. A shifting commercial landscape where the needs and benefits of digitisation materialised proved a timely boost. SOAR also embraced an emerging technology, NFC (near field communication), exploiting its potential to impact the risk management sector. CTO, Mark Cotter, gave us an insight into NFC. “Used by Apple and Google Pay, it enables users to complete a transaction on their smartphone via a simple tap & scan. We applied the same principle with SOAR_ inventory, our auditing tool by using smartphones in combination with NFC tags married to assets. When conducting an audit, a tag can be scanned by a smartphone if it is within 5cm. The flexibility of the technology means that it can be used on any type of asset, for a wide variety of applications. I even use NFC tags to control lights in my own home. It has had a transformative impact on historic inventory auditing methodology, enabling hand on asset, verifiable self-auditing of funded units across hundreds of locations simultaneously. Immediately this eliminates inventory auditing limitations in terms of budget and physical auditors visiting sites; while also maximising current resource productivity. Additionally, SOAR delivers quick cost-effective scaling across increasing asset portfolios”. Almost immediately, SOAR received interest from across the financial sector globally, including traditional banks, automotive captive banks and specialist asset funders. Impressed by the concept and trials, but conservative by nature, they all asked the same question, “who’s using it”? Credibility was provided by AIB (Allied Irish Banks) who became the company’s first major customer. Their experience and recommendation of both the product and team, was instrumental in gaining further key clients including, NextGear Capital UK and V12 Vehicle Finance (part of Secure Trust Bank in the UK). While their use of NFC garners much of the attention, it is the SOAR platform where most of the real work and magic happens. All data from each of their inventory, logistics, appraisal, inspection and prefunding app modules ends up in the SOAR cloud, accessible via a web dashboard. At the outset of each project, the SOAR team works with clients to augment and automate business processes; heightening controls and