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Project with Maximum Business Impact: Connect Dealer Management System

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

Hero Honda was earlier using a web-based business partner portal to communicate with its dealers across India. While the company would use it to fetch customer order information, the dealers would upload their sales related data to it. While the information flow was happening in this system, it was not good enough to handle large transaction volumes of 40-50 lakh two wheeler-sales per month and an equal or higher number of services per month. There were inconsistencies in the sales and service processes followed by the company's dealers, due to which customers were not getting a uniform experience. This would have hampered the company's future growth plans. For instance, if a customer was dissatisfied with the service quality offered by one dealer, and went to another, then he would have to repeat the entire process of explaining his problem to the new dealer. For dealers, it was really difficult to keep track of their sales and service processes. Managing inventory in a workshop for instance, and controlling its pilferage is one such nightmarish process, given the thousands of components that go into a two wheeler. For the company, it was difficult to keep track of where the sales were happening, and how the inventory was moving. This called for an overhaul of the existing system and implement a new system that would help the company manage its growing customer base.

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The dealer management system

The company implemented a dealer management system from Siebel at the back-end, along with Oracle's BI solution. This solution was integrated with the company's existing SAP ERP system. Hero Honda gave access into this system via MPLS links to each dealer along with an Internet-based VPN as backup. This was challenging, as it required a complete overhaul of each dealer's network, without tampering with the dealer's existing accounting system. Informatica was used for extracting data from the OLTP and OLAP cubes. The company has implemented this across 530 dealerships across 650 locations, so far. Moreover, the company has mapped six lakh villages of the country into their system to accurately determine whether the sales are happening in rural or urban locations.

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Business impact

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The system has had a remarkable impact on the company's business. Customers get a uniform experience at every Hero Honda dealership. The dealers automatically get all information they need, have better inventory management, and interconnectivity between the sales and service of every vehicle, tracking everything about it from SKU to color, and even compare sales between two different time periods. They have online warranty management and can even provide vehicle insurance to customers via this system. They can even keep track of their own manpower's efficiency, like who's serviced how many two wheelers in a day, etc. It's like a mini-ERP for each dealer.

Hero Honda can automatically get real time data related to its retail sales and ensure timely availability of vehicles across its dealerships. There's greater analytics, allowing faster and more effective decision making. They can generate compliance reports as per the company standards, and get a national summary of pre-delivery inspection defects available timely for taking preventive actions.

According to Hero Honda, this is the fastest roll out of a dealer management system in the automobile industry across the globe!

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