Hero Honda Uses Wifi to Better Product Delivery

To stay at the top, Hero Honda Motors dispatches 11,500 motorcycles everyday. With numbers like that, making sure that the right bike was going to the right dealer was incredibly hard. "One of the pain areas was tracking the frame numbers of vehicles being dispatched," says Vijay Sethi, VP-IS, Hero Honda Motors. "We needed guarantee that the right dispatches were being made at all times."

The company also wanted to ensure that bikes that got off the assembly line first, were also the first ones that be dispatched. If Sethi could find a solution, he could improve not just the picking and loading process but also the efficiency of each picker moving bikes to the loading area.

Using barcodes, wireless access points, wireless-enabled handheld terminals a middleware application, Sethi's answer mapped the bike assembly and all related processes to an existing SAP system through bar-coding. Every detail of each motorcycle including its model, color, frame and engine number, and its inventory location is captured.

Once a sales order is created, a pick list is loaded onto the handheld of a picker. At this point the barcode is scanned marking a specific vehicle for delivery. Pickers then place the bike in a loading area in front of the correct dock (each docking bay has a unique ID).

When it's loaded into a transporter, the bike's ID is scanned and validated against a delivery number. At the same time, its engine number and the truck's number are also updated on SAP.

With the technological challenges out of the way, Sethi now had to train his users. "The majority of the manpower involved in these processes are casual contract workers and the required skill level is just not there, so enormous efforts were put in order to train them," Sethi says.

The Person Behind It

Vijay Sethi, VP-IS

Hero Honda Motors

“We used readily-available, simple technology to achieve big business benefits without increasing manpower despite higher volumes.”