Hero Honda: Zipping Away on IT

Hero Honda, this revolution on two-wheels landmarks with the best in the auto
mobile world. The pace of technology here is fuelled by a very clear road that
has addressed IT as a core business issue rather than a stand-alone exercise.
The top managements involvement in selection, implementation and monitoring of
the progress and benefits has helped Hero Honda in maximizing their value
creation from IT.

As a star site for SAP ERP, Hero Honda's implementation has been one of the
quickest in the time schedule drawn. At present, Hero Honda has gone beyond its
organizational boundaries to connect its vendors and dealers by implementing the
SRM and CRM modules of SAP for online transaction and collaboration.

The electronic storage of documents has helped save considerable space, and
has made access easy. SAP's 'Business Intelligence Warehouse', which was
implemented 6 months ago for Business Intelligence is also gaining ground and
has been used to derive maximum advantage for business.

The IT infrastructure of the company is connected over three major networks,
which connect the corporate office in New Delhi with two manufacturing plants (Gurgaon
and Dharuhera), and other zonal and marketing offices through VPNs, leased
lines, and VSAT.

Considering the security and growth of data, the simple storage device has
given way to the highly redundant and scalable, Enterprise Storage System (ESS
F-20). The crucial need for backup of these servers and the demand for their
24x7 availability made Hero Honda adopt Tivoli Storage Manager, which reduced
the downtime from 18 Hrs/week to 30-mins/week.

Hero Honda's pervasive IT security policy is also in action throughout the
organization with security monitoring existing both at the technical level
(firewalls, intrusion detection and other tools) and at the user level
(information classification, access rights, defining responsibilities).

Also Hero Honda's SRM and CRM initiative along with the proposed
centralized Dealer Management Software system is expected to reduce the
lead-time in the customer order fulfillment process. This would also result in
reduced inventory levels across the supply chain and help in better forecasting
and analysis of consumer demand.

The real and substantial IT benefit is expected to arise when the consumer
demand drives all actions through to the vendor supplies. For this veritable
automobile giant, which has come so far, Hero Honda now truly aims the skies
with its plans to integrate its entire value chain with the help of technology
and provide further flexibility to business.