1. What were the businesses challenges facing Maruti Suzuki management prior to adopting the Oracle suite?
Some of the challenges included, standard practices for each part of the company. The ability for the company to procure, inventory and accounting to each of the companies properties located across the country. Another of the challenges for Maruti Suzuki was that of real time reporting back to the headquarters office in Japan in a timely manner.
2. What advantages does Maruti Suzuki derive from working with a single vendor, Oracle? What are the possible risks of working with a single vendor?
A few advantages for working with just Oracle is it minimized the possibilities of compatibility problems with other software that is being integrated. Often times a vendor is willing to take on more of the responsibilities because there is “no one else” to blame the vendor will step up to quickly resolve any technical problems. Another great plus is that your company will get the newest features faster if your running their platform.
There really is less and less reasons to use multi vendors unless your companies “best practice standards” requires a full scope of large and small companies to work with in my opinion it is a faster deployment of the systems and easier training for your staff as well.
3. What were the important business factors which management used to evaluate Oracle’s database offerings?
Management wanted a IT solution that would allow them to consolidate to one central system. Also a system that was simple and flexible to use for employees. The company was already using some of Oracles products and felt implementing other Oracle products would allow them to keep the legacy system they had. Maruti Suzuki also felt that Oracle would grow with their company as time goes on.
4. Why was it important that a vendor’s products be able to integrate with “legacy systems”?
The company did not want to spend millions of dollars