Automobile : driven by IT

Automobile : driven by IT

Fueled by growing demand the Automobile sector gaining potential to meet new challenges by deploying IT solutions

Thursday, April 05, 2007

Stuti Das

As one of the earliest adopters of IT, the automobile sector deploys latest cutting edge technology right from projecting the costs involved in doing business to IT being used as an important tool to counter competition. The adoption of IT by the sector began as early as the 70's when efficient computer systems were expensive.

Technology is an important tool for capturing information and also for forecasting future demand, enabling organizations to manufacture and stock supplies, raw material, etc.

The key requirement in the automotive sector comes from the shop floor, which requires a lot of system supporting in terms of material planning, production planning and quality control. But most importantly technology is used to define business strategy in such a way that the business objectives are met, and at the same time product quality is not compromised.

The dealer management systems are in the process of moving from a de-centralized to a centralized architecture

What it Demands

Focus

The dealer management systems are in the process of moving from a de-centralized to a centralized architecture. Most of the auto companies are now looking at a common system hosted at their site with the availability of real-time dealer data.

Consulting Panel

Prabhakar Deosthali
, consulting head, IT Solutions for Kinetic Communications (IT Arm of Kinetic Group)
Hilal Isar Khan, head corporate IT, Honda Motor India
Rajesh Uppal, chief general manager (IT), Maruti Udyog

Towards Integration

The importance of IT in the automotive industry is evident from the fact that almost all of the automotive manufacturers in India have deployed integrated ERP systems for all their operations on such a scale that IT has become the heartbeat of the automotive industry.

Source: Dataquest
In the coming months, the trend for IT solutions will be more towards integration on the shop floor such as interfacing the plant automation systems and the supervisory control and data acquisition systems (SCADA) along with IT systems for Job Shop scheduling and planning processes. On the business front there could be dependency on business intelligence for market analysis, product mix strategies and sales forecasting.The focus is now on integrating the dealers, suppliers and enterprise systems into a seamless system. Even as the dealers and suppliers have been connected individually to the company's enterprise system through dealer management system and material transaction system, respectively, but the two 'dealer and ERP' and 'Supplier and ERP' have been disjointed from each other.The demand of the automotive segment in terms of IT solutions can be divided into three categories. Firstly, end-to-end enterprise resource planning package for the complete coverage of transaction within the enterprise; secondly, extended system for the ecosystem and partners like dealers (dealer management system) and suppliers (supplier collaboration system) and a supply chain management; and lastly, specific technology solutions like Telematics Solutions, navigation system, airbag system, keyless entry system, etc that goes in the manufacturing of a car. Initially, IT adoption involved getting the end-to-end basic transaction systems in place, essentially the ERP. The opening up of the organization's boundaries to include partners like dealers and suppliers followed this up.

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