IT-based Solutions Drive Maruti Ahead

"IT in Maruti essentially orchestrates the way business runs," Rajesh Uppal, chief general manager-IT, proudly states. As the backbone for all operations IT enables the entire span of Maruti's business from maintaining a less-than-a-day inventory and manufacturing 7 lakh cars per year, to selling cars worth about Rs 66 crore in a single day!

Maruti achieved interconnectivity in the 1990s by leveraging the Internet and deploying an extensive extranet to reach its business partners. This information B2B access-point on the Internet allowed suppliers and dealers to access information pertaining to the production plan, supply status of components and vehicles, and status of payments. In times of the extranet, dealers worked on two applications. One was the extranet itself that helped them interface with Maruti for all order placements, enquiries, vehicle schedules, warranty claims, fund reconciliation, and so on. The other was a small application running on the dealers' PCs to manage their daily activities. Developed in phases since 2003 with the help of Wipro, at a cost of Rs 22 crore, the system will cover the rest of the dealers over the next six months, and merge with the extranet completely.

Uppal believes that enterprise IT projects have a life span of 8 to 10 years. "Hence, every 8 to 10 years, we take stock of where we are and introduce changes accordingly. Though IT in Maruti began with the Brroughs  mainframes, the organization migrated in 1993 to Oracle apps deployed on the open systems of Tru64 Unix running on Digital servers. Since Maruti was finding it difficult to sustain the Oracle based enterprise application, the IT team thought a fullfledged ERP would be the panacea. Six years down the line, the car giant saw its third major

technological churn. This time, Maruti re-engineered its processes and successfully migrated to ERP. "Since we were moving away from being single-location and a one-plant company to a multiple-location organization, we decided to look at our IT strategy from a long-term perspective - hence, the centralized ERP environment."

Once the ERP framework was successfully laid out, the IT team took over and deployed the add-ons. Uppal and his team took a conscious decision that they would avoid a diverse application portfolio. The organization standardized the kind of technology would be used, and decided to stick with Oracle and .Net technologies.

Though the ERP is only a year old and the DMS is still being rolled out in phases, Uppal and his IT team are already on to their next project. The spotlight is now on deploying Knowledge Management (KM) at Maruti Udyog as users are increasingly demanding an established platform for effective knowledge dissemination.

The Person Behind It

Rajesh Uppal

Chief general manager-IT, Maruti Udyog

Every eight to ten years, we take stock of where we are and introduce changes in our IT systems accordingly.