Supply chain management is a daunting task for all automotive OEM manufacturers. They need solutions to help them reduce inventory costs, increase order fulfillment and control stock out. A technology partner who understands the domain and processes end to end is what they need.
Here’s a story on how Mindtree partnered with a global automobile manufacturer, enabling them to achieve supply chain efficiencies with improved distribution management, order tracking and inventory control, through a supply chain solution.
The challenge
The customer is a leading global automobile manufacturer and has been present in India for the past 8+ years. Loss of revenue and increasing costs due to the inefficient supply chain management were affecting the customer’s business. They wanted an IT solution to improve their supply chain management, order management and distribution operations.
The application was to be used by several stakeholders spread across the globe. It needed to have a direct interface with multiple systems including the dealer management system, invoice, financial and ERP system, bank and other external fund systems and transporter systems.
The major challenges were:
- The current system was heavy, difficult to configure and not flexible, which was affecting critical business decisions and process changes
- There was no visibility of the status of the orders across the supply chain
- A lack of automation in the operations area and non-streamlined business processes resulting in low efficiency
Our solution
Mindtree with its expertise in automotive and supply chain management systems, implemented a web based application to centralize all the processes involved in successfully delivering a vehicle to the end customer, through various dealers. The end to end process of the delivery was tracked on the system.
The solution enabled:
- Dealers across the country to place orders on the system, providing a picture of how many cars needed to be manufactured and delivered in a month
- Traceability of orders on the supply chain
- Allocation of cars to the dealers where the output was used to generate an optimized dispatch plan
- Generation of exhaustive reports based on different parameters and tracking of orders at any given time
Business impact
- Provided uniform wholesale information throughout the month
- Enabled delivery commitment to customer
- Captured dealer voice in planning process
- Ensured lean stock at warehouses
