Manufacturing the TVS Wag

TVS Motors' IT investments have always been strategic. Consider this. A
two-wheeler rolls out of its assembly lines approximately every 40 seconds. In
this span of time, the finished goods roster gets updated, as does the
inventory. Its stock depletion across 30 warehouses determines the color and
model that need to be produced, which forms the basis of material planning and
replenishment.

The company provides the dealers with what they want resulting in almost the
entire ordering of Rs 2726 crore by 450 dealers taking place online. There is,
thus, only a single, unified bill of materials for the entire organization, and
this provision for the single-point availability of information across
production, engineering, quality, operations and costing has enabled the company
to increased productivity and efficiency.

Despite constraints such as unreliable leased lines and low bandwidth, high
latency but expensive VSAT, the infrastructure that permitted the 100+ users in
Mysore to work on the centralized server in Hosur had to be extended to connect
450 dealers and 200 suppliers. But by combining wireless, mobile radio and
fiber, the company managed to successfully overcome its last-mile connectivity
issues, which had earlier hampered its endeavor. Given the lack of leased lines,
the company is running its vehicle warehouse in Surat, Gujarat over the
Internet. By creating a secured VPN tunnel and then starting the SAP client, the
company has been able to invoice over Rs 100 crore by spending not more than Rs
20,000 a year (on Internet and telephone charges).

The company's Dealer Management Software (DMS) helps the dealers to
synchronize their data with the TVS server every few hours over secured
Internet. This way the company has hourly retail data on who the end customer
is, how many enquiries had been made, how many got converted, and so on. Thanks
to its DMS, the company knows exactly how many vehicles and of what color are
being held by the dealer in locations as remote as, say, Tiruchengode in Tamil
Nadu. Ample reason, then, to give the Silver award to Venkat Iyer, in the
Champion CIO in the Large Enterprise category.