>>SNAPSHOT
Maruti Suzuki
www.marutisuzuki.com
Location: Gurgaon, Haryana, India
Employees: 6,400
Revenue: US$3.5 billion (FY 2007–2008)
Oracle products and services:
Oracle E-Business Suite, including Oracle
Balanced Scorecard, Oracle Discrete
Manufacturing, Oracle iProcurement,
Oracle Human Resources, Oracle
Marketing, Oracle Warehouse
Management, and Oracle iRecruitment;
Oracle’s Hyperion enterprise performance
management; Oracle Database;
Oracle Application Server; Oracle
Developer; Oracle Fusion Middleware;
Oracle Support; Oracle Consulting
Oracle partner products and services:
Implementation and application manage-
ment services from Wipro Technologies;
dealer management solution from HP
the addition of new technologies.
“Our long-term perspective has
been that a single-vendor stack and
road map makes good business sense,”
Uppal says, adding that upgrades
have been significantly simplified
because each generation of Oracle
products ties neatly into the existing
Oracle stack. The single-vendor model
enables the company to complete
upgrades without getting stalled in
time-consuming integration projects.
It’s a model that other companies
would be well advised to follow, says
Howard Rubin, a leader in IT benchmarking and senior advisor at Gartner.
“[Maruti Suzuki is] in the business of
making cars, not the business of handling software disharmony,” he notes.
“In an industry where margin is being
squeezed, you want to get the best leverage you can, and a
single-source solution is an obvious and brilliant thing to do.”
MARKET DEMANDS
For Maruti Suzuki, standardizing on Oracle answered a need
for continual technology improvement. “In this country, technology is one area where you have to constantly innovate. You
can’t sit still,” says Uppal. “You know that you’ll be ahead of
the curve only for a short time and that your competitors will
catch up shortly, so the lifecycle of innovation isn’t very long.”
In that spirit, Uppal complemented Oracle Database and
Oracle Application Server with a growing array of Oracle
E-Business Suite modules that run its financial, purchasing, and
human resources systems, among others. The open architecture
of these components has simplified integration with Maruti
Suzuki’s legacy procurement, dispatch, time card, production
planning, and business intelligence systems, which was accomplished without any interruption to the business. That’s critical
to a company generating more than 2,000 invoices each day.
One of the key operational benefits that Maruti Suzuki
has achieved has been a level of integration that enables the
company to work more effectively with its nationwide network
of 850 dealers. The company’s proprietary dealer management system was built using Oracle Forms and has run on a
centralized Oracle Database since prior to Maruti Suzuki’s decision to standardize. But because of the disparate nature of the
company’s legacy applications, an inquiry through the dealer
management system couldn’t reveal updates entered manually
by back-office staff. This meant that one dealership might not
be able to see that another had ordered the last of a certain
part, resulting in erroneous information being passed on to the
dealership and its customers.
Today, however, the system links to various modules of the
company’s Oracle E-Business Suite deployment, ensuring that
the entire dealer network is being fed the same data. Such
integration also means that dealership
input arrives on the production floor
in real time, enabling faster response
to requests for parts or rush delivery
of vehicles.
Improved end-to-end visibility
has also allowed Maruti Suzuki to
take online sales to a new level. The
company’s evolving e-commerce capabilities now allow customers to do
everything from choosing a vehicle
to obtaining financing and insurance, all with the click of a mouse.
When a customer who has decided
on a particular vehicle logs on to
Maruti Suzuki’s Web site to contact
a dealer, options for financing and
insurance are presented. If the customer expresses interest, the system
collects the pertinent information and
automatically routes it to the nearest dealership, which can
arrange financing options with a local bank or work with the
company’s in-house financing unit before contacting the customer directly to continue the process.
END-TO-END SUPPORT
Underlying these IT improvements is a fundamental comfort
with Oracle technology, and that would not have been
achieved without assistance from Oracle Consulting during
Maruti Suzuki’s 2002 Oracle E-Business Suite deployment,
says Uppal. Oracle consultants brought with them a combination of deep knowledge of the technology and best
practices to draw upon in mapping each module to the
company’s business processes. They not only assisted Maruti
Suzuki’s IT team with the installation but also helped them
develop user manuals, designed a program for training trainers, and provided additional training for superusers. In fact,
Uppal credits Oracle’s team with helping to overcome resistance among employees who weren’t sure they wanted to
embrace new technologies.
As users have grown increasingly comfortable with Oracle
software, Uppal reports that there are fewer errors, translating to more-reliable data throughout the company’s wide-ranging application portfolio. “Standardization with one
vendor and one partner has driven knowledge skill sets,”
says Subhomoy Sengupta, senior director of applications for
Oracle India Pvt Ltd.
What’s more, as an end-to-end Oracle stack customer,
Maruti Suzuki is availing itself of Oracle’s wide-ranging
resources, working closely with Oracle Support to resolve
issues. It has also been teaming up with Oracle’s development organization, not only to help identify requirements for
planned applications—including a recently released demand
forecasting application—but also to make sure that Maruti
Suzuki is identifying the right applications to add to its stack.
