MotorCraft is running one “Dealership” and three “Service Masters” centres for Maruti Suzuki in Noida and Sahibabad area of NCR. Service Masters are the highest rated service provider outside of Maruti’s own service centre and undergo a constant audit and inspections to ensure quality of service to meet highest customer expectations. MotorCraft has won “Best Performance” award for many years in a row. The company web site is at http://www.motorcraft.in

As with any service industry, information is the key and to make sure that this is available throughout the centres the use of computers is a must. Inventory checks, price request for customers and maintaining work flow from job card creation to billing all this is done using a network of workstations. Not only is the service to be done with high standards, there are the usual customer handling issues as well. The biggest challenge being meeting the high influx of vehicle drop-in (people leaving their vehicles for service) in the morning and pick-ups in the evening. In the morning, accuracy of making job-cards is crucial to plan the service and in the evening invoicing becomes a high demand job. A high quality service requires a good quality hardware and software network.

For computerisation the very first costs are procurement of hardware and software and to get savings many organisations do not fully comply with software licensing. In the past faced with similar situation MotorCraft decided to try out Linux technology for their operations. After seeing a proof-of-concept demo including running the AutoMate application on a Linux server MotorCraft was convinced. A network was established using thin-clients at each location that run from a single desktop machine converted to a Linux server, mail and internet gateway. All the old machines were converted to thin clients and this re-cycling helped extend life of P-I’s and P-II’s and high savings of more than Rupees Ten lacs in capital costs. Other advantage has been complete protection from virus attacks and ability to do complete system management by taking care of only one machine per location leading to reduced manpower and maintenance costs.

Recently Maruti started migrating all their network of dealership and service to on line application Dealership Management System (DMS) using web-server model. Under this system all data is kept on Maruti servers which run oracle database and oracle forms query. All changes are on line and all work done at dealers end is instantly available for analysis and history. For this application to run the dealers network is connected to Maruti network either through dedicated fibre lines, where possible, or through VPN client running on ADSL links.

Since Wipro installation personnel had no background of Linux system they had “decreed” that only Windows XP with IE-6 or higher would have to be deployed to run DMS which would have meant approximate investment of Rupees Twelve lacs across the company.

So a plan was made at MotorCraft to do a test installation for running DMS on Linux system and asking installation engineers, who were not comfortable with Linux, to use a single machine using Window XP and IE-6 browser. Once the application migration demonstration was completed it was run on the existing server without any problem.

Thus MotorCraft was able to continue working without having to:
1.Dump old hardware
2.Buy new work stations with Windows XP and licenses.
3.Spend for and deploy anti-virus and other firewall software.

MotorCraft saves time, money and effort by simply extending their existing Linux systems. As with most web applications it is not really material that you run one or the other operating system but what is more important that the system should have ease of configuration and give least problems to users. Today it costs less than Rs 3,500 – including hardware and software – to roll out a new user workstation at any of their locations which translates in to huge money saved when you are approaching a total count of 100 workstations!

Footnote: I consulted at MotorCraft for their migration and use of Linux. This article was carried by Linux for You magazine in their May 2008 issue and also contains some more technical details..

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