Meru Cab Company is India's largest radio cab service provider that started its operations three years back with presence in four major Indian cities, owning and operating 5,000 cabs catering to more than 20,000 bookings per day.

Since the company's business model was quite unique and none of the available packages could cater to its processes, Meru built an in-house system to cater to its business needs for the first couple of years.

The company had big plans – to be among the largest radio cab companies globally. The company's board soon found that its systems had outgrown their utility. In early 2009 the company decided to look for a best-of-breed, highly scalable system that would also help the company strengthen its governance and control mechanism.

The major business challenges that the company faced were inadequate visibility into vehicle procurement; inappropriate utilisation of vehicles, improper cab maintenance and a high closure time.

PWC helped define the as-is and to-be processes and float an RFP for the ERP systems to suit the company needs. After an in-depth review and demos, Oracle suite of applications were selected. Oracle E-Business suit 12.1 was selected for Financials (GL, AP, AR, Cash Management, Purchasing, Fixed Assets, Inventory), HRMS (Core, Employee Self Service, Performance Management) and Enterprise Asset Management for Fleet Management and Maintenance.

“We kicked off the ERP implementation initiative to achieve a business solution that would support our growth plans by achieving speed, accuracy and cost optimisation in all our operations,” said Nilesh Sangoi, CTO, Meru Cab Company.

The solution integrates all major organisational business functions and has enabled Meru to make many policy changes around how they operate. “It has made us more competitive and enabled us to cater to customer/market needs faster,” he said. “In just four months (the system went live in Feb) we have seen around 2% improvement in the cab utilisation rate which means that we will get a Return on Investment on this project within 18 months.”

ERP in place
The ERP project started in June 2009. The first phase went live in November 09 and all modules covering all departments went live within a record time of 8 months from project initiation by February 2010.

Meru Cabs uses Cab Dispatch System which in turn is connected to Mobile Data Terminal present in the cab which is GPS and GPRS enabled. The entire process of dispatch of cars is automated based on the location of customers and cabs and their status in the queue. The ERP system is tightly integrated with the cab dispatch system. An application sends messages to drivers about their daily tasks.

Smart integration
Siebel Call Center eAutomotive Edition 8.1.1 was selected for managing the lifecycle of calls made by subscribers and for sales force automation of advertising and sales. Oracle Business Intelligence suite (OBIEE) was selected to build data warehouse and analytics platform.

The Siebel system (CRM solution) helps Meru to consider drivers as customers and not as employees of the company. It manages various functions concerned with the running of the business such drivers'  recruitment, training cab allocations, payments, performance, grievances, etc. The Enterprise Asset Management solution helps to do project management of procurement, deployment of cabs, automatic scheduling of cabs to workshops based on distance travelled, workshop available capacity and workshop rating. It also helps in creating automated work orders, purchase orders and invoice matching for various maintenance activities such as regular servicing and breakdown and accident repairs.

New technology and clever integration has helped Meru Cabs tackle many a problems that crop up while ensuring quality. The company is concerned that the drivers in its feet adhere to the company's guidelines for appropriate behaviour. So what does it do if a driver whose services were terminated in the past due to disciplinary issues tries to reapply by faking a name and a driving license? A smart integration does the trick – Siebel CRM is integrated with a biometric system that helps identify such situations. “Such checks have helped us maintain the quality of our service,” said Sangoi.

Overcoming roadblocks
Seemingly challenging tasks have been carried out by using integration. Could it be possible to assign drivers to cabs depending on the level of training of drivers? The CRM system is a repository of information about trained drivers and the ERP system has information about available cabs. The integration of the system makes it possible to decide which cab has to be allocated to which driver.

The ERP solution helped in strengthening and combining all systems together into a single, integrated software program that runs off a single back-end system so that the various departments can more easily share information, have a uniform view of information and communicate with each other more effectively.

The company is aiming to attain a feet of 10,000 cars by 2013 and planning to enter other emerging markets in India and abroad.