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IT drives Maruti

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CIOL Bureau
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Stuti Das   

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Maruti Udyog Limited (MUL) has been the leader of the Indian car market for about two decades now. It has its manufacturing plant in Gurgaon with an installed capacity of 3,50,000 units per annum, with a capability to produce about half a million vehicles.

Challenges

The company operates on a massive scale and manufactures approximately 3,000 units in a day unlike many of its competitors and, therefore, considering its scale of operations requires an efficient IT system in place. "IT is more than just ERP for us considering the manufacturing volumes. In fact IT is responsible for managing business in Maruti Udyog so much so that I can say that business orchestration is done by IT," Rajesh Uppal, Chief General Manager (IT Sales) Maruti said.

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The company, which handles approximately 18-20,000 consignments every day, has a strong MES (Manufacturing Execution System) and a strong CRM because the volumes are large. The usage of technology starts right from the planning stages and is used for forecasting right from the number of units to be produced in a given period of time to deciding which vehicle is to be produced in the next minute.

The company also has to manage complexities in terms of sensing the demand and getting a right mix, and for that it has to plan nearly four-five months in advance about the products that would sell and in what quantities.

Solution

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Therefore, it has a strong focus on Supply Chain Management (SCM), which forms the core of its IT set-up. The SCM includes marketing and material systems and spares systems. These applications take care of some aspects like demand forecasting, vehicle production tracking, production planning, stock etc. It also took up e-procurement for reducing costs and improving procurement processes.

Maruti also has in place an innovative and sophisticated Oracle-based IT infrastructure in place to enhance customer satisfaction and employee interactions within the company. It uses Oracle Applications on top of Oracle Database and Oracle Fusion Middleware, aimed at stimulating the company's value chain for business excellence through an innovative IT system.

Benefits

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Being a 25 year-old company, Maruti was one of the first to recognize IT as a primary function and started using IT way back in 1985-86 when it was still in its nascent stage. The newly established Manesar plant had all the IT systems in place at the inauguration including Shop Floor, material receipts etc. The criticality of IT systems is to the point of dependency as any downtime would result in one less car being produced (MUL produces one unit every 28 seconds).

The company starts deploying IT solution right from the entrance itself wherein every visitor's arrival at the reception is intimated to the concerned person in real time. An email is shot off the moment a visitor pass is issued. With 750 dealer offices spread across the length and breadth, dealers initially used to have individual systems running which forebade sharing of customer and dealer details. The Dealer Management System (a centrally hosted application in Bangalore) in place, internally linked to to MUL's systems, supports all their business processes like enquiry, tracking, post services track up, sales ordering, invoicing, sales etc. Also it would also track past records of any customer including services done, repairs done, etc once the details of the customer are keyed in resulting in real time recording.

The company also recently deployed RFID solution on the shop floor for providing proper correlation between the engine and chassis.

Looking ahead, Uppal says that from the applications perspective, ERP system, shop floor and supply chain system apart from Business Intelligence would be the key deliverables. With the technology lifecycle reducing, MUL is looking at new technologies for making it more customer focused and efficient.