Dealing with the Dealers

To get the pulse of the market and come more close to the dealers, Maruti Suzuki India (MSIL) implemented a centralized hosted application for its dealers, named Dealer Management System (DMS). The DMS application covers pre-sales, sales, service, spare and CRM functionalities. Even though the DMS covers partial information related to financial transactions, it does not come with a complete financial accounting and consolidation package.

Jai Prakash Yadav, GM-IT, MSIL said, “MSIL has implemented DMS in more than 500 locations across India with integrating Tally for financial transactions. MSIL has achieved significant sales after implementing DMS and has proven to be a market leader.”

Areas of concern
The challenges that some of the dealers were facing in this effort were, that they wanted a robust financial accounting system to be incorporated into the same DMS. And at the same time, they did not want to share their financial details with MSIL, as they were involved in other businesses as well, apart from MSIL vehicle sales and service. Due to these adverse requirements, MSIL did get into the development of a financial accounting module into the DMS. While taking feedback from the dealers, MSIL found that the dealers were more comfortable using Tally for their financial accounting.
“In order to cater the dealer's need of having a standard financial package integrated with DMS and also maintaining information security, from the dealers' point of view, MSIL decided to integrate DMS with the Tally package. The complete functionality of financial accounting was provided by Tally, while the business-related functionality was taken care by DMS. And both the systems are tightly integrated to avoid duplicate data updation at both ends,” added Yadav.

The solution
In term of solution, Tally developed an integration utility between the DMS and Tally's financial accounting application, wherein the routine transactions were done by dealers in the DMS. The transactions done in DMS were automatically integrated into Tally as per the dealer's desired frequency. The transactions that were transferred to Tally, would create a financial accounting data of the dealer online. This is where, Tally takes care of the financial accounting part and statutory requirements related to VAT.
Yadav further highlighted that importing of transactions would enable Tally to perform various tasks like maintaining account books of dealers, complying statutory requirements, and generate financial statements and MIS reports. As and when a new dealer is added, the DMS is rolled out along with the Tally solution. For the existing dealers, the changes and improvisations required, are incorporated into the application and that goes as a permanent solution to the complete Maurti network of dealers.

Reaping the benefits
With this deployment, the dealer is able to do away with the task of re-entering the entire data manually into Tally. The implementation process actually started six years ago and got completed in 18 months. The major benefit that Maruti and its dealers got through this integration was following a standard package of financial accounting with no additional efforts on data updation. The different locations of dealerships were also integrated and financial compilation was made possible at location level or at parent level.

Nivedan Prakash
(nivedanp@cyermedia.co.in)