1. What were the business challenges facing Maruti Suzuki management prior to adopting the oracle suite?
The challenges facing Maruti Suzuki management prior to adopting the oracle suite is India at the time was one of the largest car markets in the world and Maruti Suzuki was the leader of that market. Maruti Suzuki then began diversifying their market by adding financing, leasing, insurance and pre-own car business to it. Due to the size and complexity of their organization, Maruti Suzuki was having a difficult time maintaining their explosive growth and was not able to efficiently managed their information management systems. Part of their challenge stems from the fact that a lot of their information systems came local home-grown systems in India and they were not able to communicate in sync which each other leading Maruti to have extra staff in order to coordinate data.
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?
The advantages that Maruti Suzuki derive from working with a single vendor is when buying information systems, they will have a unified software that will be able to communicate and cut out the need for additional staff for coordinating data. Oracle also has a consulting service that can provide Maruti Suzuki managers with any information or knowledge during the implementation in order to have the transition smoothly switch over from the old information system without any interruptions. The possible risk of working with a single vendor is that you becoming totally dependent on their services. If down the road you find out that their product is not exactly what you wanted the cost of having to switch things out can be quite expensive. Not to mention the single vendor can also raises their fees over time since you are already bought into their program you don’t have much choice but to pay the new prices or risk interruptions