Cover Story | Enterprise Architecture dealership. The DMS is centrally hosted on a datacenter in Bangalore and takes care of customer interacting functions such as enquiry tracking, service and spares of cars. In times of the extranet, dealers worked on two applications. One was the extranet itself that helped them interface with Maruti for all order placements, enquiries, vehicle schedules, warranty claims, fund reconciliation, and so on. The other was a small application running on the dealers' PCs to manage their daily activities. With the individual PC-based application, details of cars remained isolated at the service station used. These applications have been pulled out from the dealers and integrated with Maruti’s ERP to bring all systems online. The DMS, presently running parallel to the extranet, reaches out to more than 500 of the 700-strong Maruti dealers. Developed in phases since 2003 with the help of Wipro, at a cost of Rs 22 crore, the system will cover the rest of the dealers over the next six months, and merge with the extranet completely. “A customer can walk in to any of our dealerships now, and it will have the history and details of his car, regardless of whether the car was serviced there in the past," says Uppal. "It is an application that helps dealers run their business and ultimately to offer our customers with utomakers keep the cash registers ringing not only by selling cars but also by selling uniform experience, as we want to present precious spare parts. Maruti Udyog’s revenues from sale of spare parts are so high a single face across our dealerships.” that the carmaker has deployed a state-of-the-art IT-driven program to manage it. Today, all customer touch-point “Managing an inventory of spares can be taxing in the absence of an accurate IT interfaces are enabled by IT. The whole solution,” says Rajesh Uppal, head of IT at Maruti. “Warehouse Management System process of demand management is (WMS) facilitates increased inventory turnover and faster turnaround time.” tightly integrated. Maruti captures The WMS is automated to such an extent that no one person knows which component information from the point of enquiry at is to be picked up by which customer at which city. All an operator needs to do is follow each dealer to find out which customer the instructions from the system and assemble the spare parts in a consignment for a asked for which color, model or subcustomer. Even the size of the box to be dispatched is chosen by the WMS. This fullyvariant. The enterprise then figures out automated process cuts down human intervention and minimizes errors. how many enquiries are coming in vis-à“once the system receives the request for supply, it decides the size of the box that is vis the enquiry-to-sales conversion ratio supposed to carry the material and which truck it needs to be loaded in,” says Uppal. and what needs to be done to generate A courier carrying a handheld device scans his first instruction barcode, where he is similar enquiries. asked to pick up a box of a particular size. once that box is scanned and placed in his trolley, The DMS also supports post-sales the courier gets his next pickup instruction, much like the cues one gets in a treasure hunt. processes, such as follow-ups after This goes on till his trolley contains all the required spare parts. If the operator errs and service, extended warranties, and so on. tries to scan the barcode of a product that does not conform to the system instruction, “We maintain report cards for each car. the WMS halts him — it does not give the next instruction. We have car-related data available on the once the box is full, a packing list is automatically generated and the box is dispatched basis of chassis numbers," says Uppal. "If for consolidation and packaging. The moment the consignment leaves the warehouse, you got your car serviced at Bangalore the system notifies the dealer. and later went to a Delhi service center, “The process of warehouse management for assembling spare parts and components the same report card will be available for the shop floor is similar. However, the boxes for shop floor are not packed as the shop with the dealer there,” he adds. To floor and the warehouse are in close proximity,” says Uppal. manage customer relations better, the — G.T. in which they interface with us. We helped dealers procure modems and taught them how to dial into the systems to send e-mails to us. From that level of handholding, the dealer and supplier community has come a long way. If I need to roll out a new module in the extranet today, all I need to do is send them an e-mail with a well-defined support document, and they start using it without any effort in terms of training,” he says. Maruti has now embarked on a journey called Dealer Management System (DMS) to roll out an ERP that is tightly integrated with Maruti’s ERP for its dealers to manage their
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3 0 j u n e 1 5 , 2 0 0 7 | REAL CIO WORLD
Vol/2 | ISSUE/15