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TVS Motors' IT investments have always been strategic. Consider this. A two-wheeler rolls out of its assembly lines approximately every 40 seconds. In this span of time, the finished goods roster gets updated, as does the inventory. Its stock depletion across 30 warehouses determines the color and model that need to be produced, which forms the basis of material planning and replenishment.

The company provides the dealers with what they want resulting in almost the entire ordering of Rs 2726 crore by 450 dealers taking place online. There is, thus, only a single, unified bill of materials for the entire organization, and this provision for the single-point availability of information across production, engineering, quality, operations and costing has enabled the company to increased productivity and efficiency.

Despite constraints such as unreliable leased lines and low bandwidth, high latency but expensive VSAT, the infrastructure that permitted the 100+ users in Mysore to work on the centralized server in Hosur had to be extended to connect 450 dealers and 200 suppliers. But by combining wireless, mobile radio and fiber, the company managed to successfully overcome its last-mile connectivity issues, which had earlier hampered its endeavor. Given the lack of leased lines, the company is running its vehicle warehouse in Surat, Gujarat over the Internet. By creating a secured VPN tunnel and then starting the SAP client, the company has been able to invoice over Rs 100 crore by spending not more than Rs 20,000 a year (on Internet and telephone charges).

The company's Dealer Management Software (DMS) helps the dealers to synchronize their data with the TVS server every few hours over secured Internet. This way the company has hourly retail data on who the end customer is, how many enquiries had been made, how many got converted, and so on. Thanks to its DMS, the company knows exactly how many vehicles and of what color are being held by the dealer in locations as remote as, say, Tiruchengode in Tamil Nadu. Ample reason, then, to give the Silver award to Venkat Iyer, in the Champion CIO in the Large Enterprise category.

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