Wiring Maruti

Rajesh

Uppal is a busy man these days. When we caught him for ten minutes, the IT chief

of India’s biggest car maker was rushing off to Agra. Not to the Taj, but to

address a dealer meet on the next step in Maruti’s dealer-Web integration. The

first step was the linking of its 260 dealers in India into its wide area

network. Now, some 60 percent of the Rs 9,672 crore ($2.1 billion) Maruti’s

business transactions are conducted online.

You may not attribute e-savvy to this ageing public sector company. Not even

when you enter its grand factory premises in the Delhi suburb of Gurgaon,

Haryana, where dockyards hold hundreds of cars, large hangers house machinery

and paints shops, and trucks stuffed with Zens move out of the gates. Nor when

you find that your entry depends on an e-message to the receptionist that

somehow got delayed 20 minutes. Nor by that non-descript two-story building in a

corner.

That’s the hub of IT operations, from where Uppal has been driving Maruti’s

e-journey. Market leadership wasn’t hard in an enforced monopoly situation.

But maintaining it amidst MNC competition was tougher, and a strong infotech

backbone was crucial. "IT preceded production here," Uppal says.

"And it has remained on par with other business operations."

His team of 70 is now busy on the next phase–supply chain management (SCM).

For many years, major suppliers such as Sona Steering have already been part of

the Maruti extranet; now the company is getting ready to include its full

network of 300 suppliers, including second-tier suppliers, with its SCM rollout

in March.

Ahead of time. The little Maruti 800 that triggered an auto-sector revolution

in India in 1984 survived decades sans upgrades. But its manufacturer has been

more tech-savvy. When it went for an automated management system a decade ago,

there was no ERP vendor in the country. The solution: "Let’s do it

ourselves."

Using software from Oracle, CA and others, Maruti built the apps to support

its internal business processes. It then extended these to its sales network

through a simple e-mail-based ordering system. A dealer generates an order on

his own PC, specifying model, color, accessories, etc, and sends it over e-mail.

At Maruti, this is automatically checked, classified (vehicle vs spares

requirement, etc), and sends it to the right database. The Maruti software at

the dealerships "helped standardize the information coming to us from the

market," says Uppal.

Uppal team is focusing on its dealer and supplier network operations,

fine-tuning its SCM and B2B systems. But it’s also taking B2C initiatives,

with a Website to provide detailed product information for buyers.

E for efficiency. For this auto major, an e-enabled supply chain has been the

key to inventory management, at the dealer level as well as in the company.

Reduced paper-work has stepped up efficiency and the speed of processing orders.

It has also improved working capital management. An order that earlier took five

days to reach them is now reflected and processed in 15 minutes.

Says Uppal: "E-enabling Maruti for us was about pushing up our

efficiency. Even if it did not translate into revenues immediately, we needed to

prepare ourselves for the future." The 2001 slowdown in small and midsize

cars–Maruti’s key markets–presents the first real competitive challenge,

to demonstrate how well that e-vision will pay off for the bottom line.

SHWETA VERMA–Dataquest