CIOIN

Rajesh Uppal

Executive Officer - IT & CIO , Maruti Suzuki, India

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Rajesh Uppal is Executive Officer - IT & CIO at Maruti Suzuki, India.

Recently, I was reviewing the IT landscape of our entire value chain and I found that our business partners need to focus attention on the IT front . While interacting with their CEOs and CIOs, I could see that IT adoption was a concern area and that they needed a greater understanding of what it could deliver for them.

Although they had implemented industry-standard ERP suites, they were not leveraging them optimally. They believed that their IT journey has reached an end with ERP. So, despite spending vast amounts of money, they couldn't see the tangible benefits of IT.

Unless IT information and the business scenarios reconcile on real-time basis, faith in IT loses its meaning. For effective decision making, management needs reliable, accurate, and authentic information. IT systems can truly empower them with that.

ERP provides strong transaction systems, but life doesn't stop there. We need to think beyond that to reap true IT benefits. But before getting in the space of 'beyond ERP', we need to ensure that current IT systems (read ERP) are robust and that they have an effective reporting and control system.

In the manufacturing industry, shop floor systems, traceability systems, and quality systems are key differentiators. With next generation machines, data from the machines themselves can be integrated with IT systems to provided end-to-end visibility and ensure fool-proofing and traceability.

"ERP provides strong transaction systems, but life doesn't stop there. We need to think beyond that to reap true IT benefits."

The CIO should work along with business users to analyze business KPIs coming out of ERPs and find ways to improve those KPIs using a process of continuous improvement and innovative solutions. If organizations can weed out inefficiencies, their efforts will translate into plum business benefits. By adopting these measures, for instance, we have reduced Maruti's inventory levels five times over the course of the last few years. We have also reached over 98 percent of service levels for our customers.

Another focus area is collaboration, by which I mean real-time information visibility or data interchange between customers and suppliers .

IT systems beyond ERP or ERP++, act as a differentiator from competition. But the life of any innovative solution is short so we have to continuously spin the wheel and keep on innovating to stay ahead.

Thanks to these strategies, our top line, bottom line and customer satisfaction levels have also steadily improved.