About Tata Motors:

Tata Motors is India's largest automobile company, with revenues of US$7.2

billion in 2006-07. With over 4 million Tata vehicles plying in India, it is the
leader in commercial vehicles and the second largest in passenger vehicles.
It is also the world's fifth largest medium and heavy truck manufacturer and
the second largest heavy bus manufacturer. Tata cars, buses and trucks are
being marketed in several countries in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South
Asia, and South East Asia and in Australia. Tata Motors and Fiat Auto have
formed an industrial joint venture in India to manufacture passenger cars,
engines and transmissions for the Indian and overseas markets; Tata Motors
also has an agreement with Fiat Auto to build a pick-up vehicle at Córdoba,
Argentina. The company already distributes Fiat-branded cars in India. Tata
Motors’ international footprint include Tata Daewoo Commercial Vehicle Co.
Ltd. in South Korea; Hispano Carrocera, a bus and coach manufacturer of
Spain in which the company has a 21% stake; a joint venture with Marcopolo,
the Brazil-based body-builder of buses and coaches; and a joint venture with
Thonburi Automotive Assembly Plant Company of Thailand to manufacture
and market pickup vehicles in Thailand. Tata Motors has research centres in
India, the UK, and in its subsidiary and associate companies in South Korea
and Spain.

Tata Motors got started on what it has tagged the customer relationship
management-dealer management system (CRM-DMS) at the turn of the
millennium, when it was battling to regain relevance at a difficult time in its
history. That’s when it realised that survival in the auto business depended
on managing its relationships with its customers, dealers and anyone else
who had a deep connection with the mother company.
This was no mean task, considering the scale and complexity of the issues
involved. Two parameters — customers, and their interface with the
company, the dealers — were the critical links in a complex chain that Tata
Motors had to deal with. The solution led to the emergence of Tata Motors’
integrated CRM-DMS, which is today the largest such application in the
automobile industry worldwide, linking to more than 1,200 dealers across
India and tracking the needs of some 25,000 customers.
Tata Motors had no standard or benchmark to model its solution on when the
relationship concept was first considered, back in 2002. The company
realised that it had to look at the business in a fundamentally different way.
Instead of selling to the customer, Tata Motors embarked on an ambitious
programme to make its extended organisation get into the customer’s shoes
and envision each little detail as if it was meant to serve him.
The challenge was taken on by over 40 cross-functional teams, comprising
one member each from design, manufacturing, sales and marketing, and
service. Based on the output of this ‘quality functional deployment’ exercise
and customer satisfaction surveys, Tata Motors came up with the top 25
issues that it needed to address from the customer’s point of view.
To standardise the sales process, the company broke it up into a four-part
cycle: enquiry, warm prospect, hot prospect (industry terminology for
potential buyers), and completion of sale and vehicle delivery. Using
statistical analysis on the segmented data, the company was now able to
predict its sales patterns.
Once standardisation was carried out across the dealer network, results were
visible almost immediately. Accurate sales forecasts, reduced inventory for
the company and the dealer, and better production scheduling were only
some of the benefits. A shorter delivery cycle for the customer was an
important fringe advantage.
Tata Motors then embarked on implementing a solution that also facilitated
the free flow of information across the enterprise. It put in place a robust
information technology platform in the form of an innovative dealer
management system, which automated sales processes for its 1,600 dealer
locations, allowing them more time to focus on the customer.
Customer Relationship Management of Tata Motors:
Tata Motors’ integrated Customer Relationship Management (CRM)—Dealer
Management System (DMS) initiative has crossed the significant milestone of
covering 1000 locations in India and abroad.

Being implemented in phases since 2003 the combined on-line CRM-DMS

initiative now supports over 15,000 users, within the company and among its
channel partners in India and abroad, to conduct all customer-facing
transactions.

The real time availability of customer and product information is enabling the
company and its channel partners to improve response time and customer
service. The success of this complex implementation extending across
geographies is being made possible by strong partnerships with CMC, IBM,
INCAT & Tata Technologies Limited (TTL), Oracle, Mercuri International,
Quality Kiosk, TCS, Tata Indicom, TIVS (Tatanet) and VSNL.

Tata Motors has built its DMS using Oracle’s Siebel verticals and uses Siebel
CRM and Siebel Analytics for all pre and post sales operations. The unique
outside-in approach adopted by Tata Motors and the extended use of
Oracle’s Siebel CRM makes it one of the most sophisticated and largest
Siebel CRM implementations globally.

The implementation on IBM's high-end Power5 servers & enterprise storage

is the largest centrally hosted implementation of Siebel CRM worldwide
within the automotive industry. Tata Motors has also partnered with IBM to
become IBM's first automotive on-demand client in India, taking benefits of
the Global Service Delivery Centre based in Bangalore.

Tata Motors chose Siebel for its CRM programme, which with its user-friendly
interface simplified the process of training the company’s 15,000-plus dealer
sales force. To support each dealer — who is actually a business partner
representing the company with the end customer — Tata Motors involved
dealers throughout the configuration and deployment process.
“Integrating the Siebel Automotive CRM with our system ensured that our
dealers would immediately see the value in the solution,” says KR
Sreenivasan, head of CRM and DMS. “This helped us overcome the usual
resistance to change and gain rapid acceptance from our dealers.”
Its CRM-DMS initiative, which has cost Tata Motors about Rs35 crore to date,
has enabled the company to connect with 1,200 dealers online (the number
is expected to rise to 1,600 in the next few months) and has allowed it to
monitor finances and inventory at the dealer level, and services, spares and
complaints at the customer end.
CRM-DMS has helped Tata Motors enormously in getting a firmer handle on
its business. The system was implemented in three phases, the objective
being to achieve success in one before moving on to the next:
• Phase 1 focused on capturing customer and vehicle data and
automating routine tasks.
• In phase 2 this data was used to improve customer interactions and
streamline product development and planning.
• Phase 3, now underway, concentrates on tuning the system and
delivering additional value-added services to customers.
The CRM-DMS platform has been integrated with a wide array of back-office
applications, including inventory management, fulfilment and parts location.
Pricing and tax calculations can now be adjusted for each dealer’s
requirements. The comprehensive sales and reporting functionality built into
the Siebel solution allows Tata Motors to distribute sales targets directly to
its dealers and roll up sales numbers across the country in real time.
Tata Motors' dealers are a happy lot, too. The dealer management system
has meant a gross reduction in the amount of working capital needed to run
their businesses. Transactions between the company and dealers, which
earlier took up to 60 days, are now completed online and sealed in under
seven days.
Even the service bays at the workshops have happy stories to tell. The
system-based job card enables the mechanic to follow a checklist and
diagnose faults through a process of elimination of probable causes,
slashing diagnosis time. Simultaneously, the stores manager uses the
system-based job card to assort a basket of the spare parts needed to fix the
fault, and they are ready for pickup even before the mechanic walks into the
stores.
With zero waiting times built into the service process, the system generates
a dashboard for the workshop supervisor, indicating idle capacity and
process times, and highlighting bottlenecks to optimise the use of service
bays. The recent implementation of an SMS capability means that the
system directly pings the customer when the job card is closed on the
system and his vehicle is ready.
The company can also now track each vehicle right through its operating
lifetime, giving it valuable insights on product performance over time (earlier
this was limited to the warranty period, after which scant information was
forthcoming).
“Overall, we have transformed our organisation and made it truly customer-
centric,” says Sreenivasan. “One of our first dealers to install the system
doubled his sales volume in three months without the need for additional
manpower. Another said that he can, for the first time, view his entire stock
of vehicles and see how his inventory was ageing.”
But, as the old cliché goes, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The real
reward comes from the customer. With a product line spanning commercial,
utility, and passenger vehicles, Tata Motors is on the road to forging ever
stronger relationships with the people who have bet their money on the
company’s products.