The focus of this paper is to understand the existing information overflow gaps in the automotive industry (especially between the OEMs and component manufacturers), to identify problems and possible solutions that leverage the power of internet to streamline information flow and ensure accurate and rapid communication.

OEMs – domestic and export make use of their own information systems to publish delivery schedules, Goods Inward Note (GIN), rejection and payment details. The publishing media for most of OEM’s internal systems are largely websites.

Auto component suppliers need to log on to each of these sites frequently and check for new information as well as changes. Auto component suppliers are also required to publish information from their internal systems to these different customers in the formats they require.      Click here to have a look at the flow of work and documents for normal cases.

This gives rise to two major problem scenarios for the auto component suppliers - one to comply with the different information systems of each customer and two to work with the various formats of information from and to each customer. People spend a lot of time synchronizing information systems rather than on productive work.

The general solution is manual re-keying of data. In other words, it is to push information like delivery schedules, GIN, rejection, payment details from each of the customer website into the internal ERP system and pull information like order status from the internal ERP and enter it into each of the customer website.

Manual methods suffer issues such as loss of data accuracy during data transmission and inability to identify all changes that have occurred in the website since the last visit. This results in unsynchronized working between customer and the supplier. The price paid due to lack of accurate information is heavy such as dent in the responsiveness of the supplier, lost customers or lost revenue due to production beyond demand.

Auto component suppliers would be alleviated of their problems when there is a system that pulls and pushes information from and to the customer websites. The solution acting as a hub should be capable of collecting transactional information from various sources (websites) and transform it into a unified format as used at the supplier end. Also it should collect information from internal ERPs (homegrown or standards such as SAP) and translate into the formats required by each customer. In addition to this, the context of the business transaction needs to be preserved.

TEXworld's e-business enablement solution acts as a transaction hub - automatically picking up order, GIN, rejection and payment details from various OEM websites and sending out order status details to the customers. It allows smooth flow of critical information at the right time to the right people increasing the organization's efficiency.

Transaction Aggregation Engine, the core of the e-Business Hub, is especially customized to the needs of automobile industry for collecting, transforming and syndicating the business transactions automatically from a varied range of procurement and supplier information systems.

The Transaction Dashboard, which is a part of the e-Business hub enables communication and information dissemination such as stock availability at manufacturing plants and warehouses for the distributed Direct / Indirect sales channels.

The solution automates business communication happening in an unstructured way through formatted e-mails , file attachments, EDI and through customer websites and is readily made available for integration with the existing back office system.

“All the trading partners are connected through a single integration point and this eliminates multiple point to point communications which are currently established and maintained”

In short, this solution provides a single window business communication for all customers which will enable deeper interaction between OEM/Export & retail customers, and the direct/ indirect sales channels. Apart from facilitating integration with the existing back office system, this solution also provides unparalleled flexibility in delivery options to customer care and branch offices.

“Enterprise solutions have evolved from simple, front-end applications to integrated systems that link entire value chains. To create these value chains, interconnecting the pockets of information, aggregation and syndication of the transactions is fundamental”