Dotcom: What's Hot!

For a company born in February 1981, at the peak of the licence raj, competition was something that existed only for a few months after it commenced production in November 1983. Once its technological superiority was established over the Ambassadors and Fiats, it was a free run for Maruti. Even today, its market share is 60 per cent.

But competition forced the wiring up of Maruti. With 12 high-end Compaq Alpha servers, with 17.9 terabytes of storage capacity for remote backup and disaster recovery, the Maruti network-one of India's largest-handled transactions worth Rs 19,000 crore during 2000-01. That includes sales of Rs 1.2 crore worth of spares every week.

All suppliers have integrated their systems with Maruti's to cut inventories and costs. To make sure the 189 dealers across 147 cities have their stocks replenished immediately after registering a sale, Maruti has also extended its extranet-a computer network modelled on internet architecture-to the dealers. ''The whole system helps to take decisions faster,'' says Rajesh Uppal, general manager, information technology. The Maruti network will soon be expanded to a part of the 1,723 workshops spread over 740 cities. That will allow managers and workers to learn about fault repair online, and Maruti to monitor service quality.

All 11 offices of Maruti Udyog are connected on a 256-kbps link. The company's 350 Indian suppliers are hooked to Maruti's internal network.
Result: Inventories are now down from five days to less than 36 hours.

Production plans are shared with key vendors upto three weeks in advance. The Delivery Instruction System is an extension of Maruti's wired structure, the extranet, for key vendors. By mutual agreement, not more than 5-10 per cent variation from the plans is allowed.
Result: Many vendors have cut their inventories by a third.

Everyday: nearly 1,400 vehicles, a minimum of 8,000 components each, 11 brands, 35 variants and about 100 colours. A 25-km mesh of optic fibre runs across the plant, allowing the 4,600 workers real-time access to information. Vendors can access the information on a need-to-know basis across the extranet.
Result: Plant can access information regarding availability of components and production schedules 24x7.

All 216 sales outlets are hooked to the Maruti extranet. The mess of manual booking and confirmation has been eliminated. Coming up: e-learning for dealers and service centres. Soon, it will be used to monitor quality of service too.
Result: Logging an order once took five days. It's down now to a few minutes.