Foundations of Management Information System



Foundations of Management Information System

What were the businesses challenges facing Maruti Suzuki management prior to adopting the Oracle suite?

Maruti Suzuki was facing an increasing pressure for launching new models in a very short frame of time. Apart from this, there was an immense pressure for cost reduction and quality improvement. Matters became even worse when the customers' demands started to change rapidly, with no change in their perceptions and needs, (Becker, 2007). There was a need to be more productive in terms of 'car to market' time.

The company was looking for a possible solution of forming a plan for inventory optimization and for creating a demand that was holistic, for its supply chain. For enabling precision in control and demand planning, the company was thinking of implementing a tool for inventory optimization and strategizing it's forecasting, with statistical algorithms inbuilt system that could be useful in handling seasonality, trends and event impacts, (Gulyani,2001). This tool, apart from planning the distribution of its components to various places, was to be used for providing information and handle vendor order management, helping the management decide on the company's supply chain strategies.

What advantages does Maruti Suzuki derive from working with a single vendor, Oracle? What are the possible risks of working with a single vendor?

Working with a single vendor will be beneficial for the company as it reduces issues associated with the compatibility. Having a single vendor will mean that it will be specifically designing products for Suzuki Maruti. Further, there will be less chances of cross application of features and the processing speeds will be fast. Having to run things from the same platform, Suzuki Maruti's infrastructure will be in a position to deploy applications and new features, a lot quicker. Time, which is very crucial ...