New Holland Fiat India, a wholly owned subsidiary of CNH Global – a leading agricultural equipment company – is a majority owned subsidiary of the Fiat Group.

Previously, tractor requirements within the company were booked in an offline batch mode at the head office. Also, order booking process was not integrated with the monthly forecast submitted by Commercial Business Units (CBUs). The CBU members consist of people from sales, service and parts business.

The tracking was manual and feedback was not instantaneous. Moreover there was a huge amount of paper work that was involved in order to approve any sales order for which the credit limit differed from the usually accepted limit.

When the company decided to expand and sell tractors directly in the rural areas of the country, it realised that lack of infrastructure in these parts would hamper business growth.

For fixing these challenges and so as to bring more transparency in the overall process, the IT team developed a new online web ordering system that would smoothen operations of Sales Order Management (SOM), invoicing and shipment of consignments to customers.

“We integrated our ERP, web services and mobile technology in such a way that any shipment that takes place from the plant is communicated directly to our dealers and CBUs,” says Avinash Arora, Director - IS (India & S  E Asia), New Holland Fiat  (India).

So the moment a dealer or CBU places an order and it is confirmed and accepted, the dealer/CBU gets a message on his mobile. “The system is now much more agile, the processes transparent and the results accurate,” Arora says.

During the time of booking the order, a CBU user associated with the dealer or the dealer himself is equipped with the latest information on the stocks. Such information includes advances to end customers and the status of all other financial parameters that are mandatory to be validated by the commercial processes viz. bank guarantee and security deposit status of the dealer, MOP (monthly operating plans) figures, outstanding, payment plan for the month, status of transit money, etc.  “We have captured the data in transit money (accounts receivables) using SMS integration with ERP. The data is available for on-line financial parameters validation all the time and is updated every time the transaction takes place,” says Arora.  

Order booking can now be out of the pre-defined MOP only or under exceptional cases in which a dealer can demand on the spot order booking and shipment request or could book an advance order.

Order approval is automated through a workflow based on defined business rules; the process is web-based and integrated with the mobile system. Approval triggers can be automatically sent, obviating the need for anyone to be physically present in the plant or warehouse.  

An auto mail is generated the moment an order is submitted by the CBU or the dealer. The approving authority gets a clear picture of the status of the order particulars and financial parameters with green /red coloured buttons. A click on the relevant button triggers the processes to move forward either for order processing and subsequent shipment or cancellation.

The order is registered using an auto function system (AFS) that allows writing of an intelligent program in the ERP. In this case, it was written using a BaaN tool. This program keeps running in the background and integrates the ERP and mobile  solution.

If a particular dealer is able to satisfactorily meet all the financial parameters, an invoice is generated and gets published on the web. This also reaches the dealers' mobile phone and provides details regarding the order placed, shipment made and the invoice number and the amount, if any, that needs to be paid.

“The system is now much more agile, the processes transparent and the results accurate” Avinash Arora Director - IS (India & S E Asia), New Holland Fiat (India)