Tata Motors' integrated customer relationship management (CRM)-dealer management system (DMS) initiative has crossed the significant milestone of covering 1000 locations in India and abroad.

Being implemented in phases since 2003, the combined on-line CRM-DMS initiative now supports over 15,000 users within the company and among its channel partners in India and abroad to conduct all customer-facing transactions.

The real-time availability of customer and product information is enabling the company and its channel partners to improve response time and customer service. The success of this complex implementation extending across geographies is being made possible by strong partnerships with CMC, IBM, INCAT and Tata Technologies (TTL), Oracle, Mercuri International, Quality Kiosk, TCS, Tata Indicom, TIVS (Tatanet) and VSNL.

Tata Motors has built its DMS using Oracle's Siebel verticals and uses Siebel CRM and Siebel Analytics for all pre- and post-sales operations. The unique outside-in approach adopted by Tata Motors and the extended use of Oracle's Siebel CRM makes it one of the most sophisticated and largest Siebel CRM implementations globally.

The implementation on IBM's high-end Power5 servers and enterprise storage is the largest centrally hosted implementation of Siebel CRM worldwide within the automotive industry. Tata Motors has also partnered with IBM to become IBM's first automotive on-demand client in India, taking benefits of the global service delivery centre based in Bangalore.