Mahindra Holidays and Resorts India Limited (MHRIL) sells timeshare holidays across India and internationally; collects EMIs from its customers; develops & maintains resorts; provides excellent hospitality services in its resorts and maintains the best customer relationships. This made their choice easy; the implementation of the robust Microsoft Dynamics –AX system with full two-way integration with the external CRM Package -Talisma has given the customer a strong advantage in managing the back end operation effectively. This in turn has resulted in higher productivity in terms of cost and time . .
Overview
Country: India
Industry:
Consumer (f&b, hospitality, retail)
Customer Profile
Mahindra Holidays and Resorts India Ltd provide services in the Timeshare, Hotels and Resorts industry. It is primarily in the business of selling family holidays through Life Time Memberships both to individual and corporate clients. The company is headquartered in Chennai and has eight domestic branches and one international branch. The company sells through its own sales team and franchisee networks (Direct Sales Agents (DSA)). The company commenced operations in 1997 and is a part of a Rs.6, 000 crore (USD 1.2 billion) group. MHRIL also develops and builds new holiday destinations in India and overseas and provides the best hospitality services to its customers.
Business Situation
As a timeshare company, MHRIL has to focus on multiple focal points to ensure success in its business. First and foremost, it has to focus on all the hospitality and customer service while providing its services to the end customer in their resorts. As a sales organization, it has to focus on the retail segment, and as a result needs to have a strong sales organization and a dealer network. Since it also collects EMI as a mode of its sales collection, it has to ensure that the billing and the collections are done at a retail level. Being a part of one of the largest groups in India, it had to also provide timely information to meet the group demands. Mahindra today (in 2005) is a company with over Rs. 156 crores of turnover (Approximately: US$ 34 Million) servicing over 40,000 members with a growth rate of over 50%.
Mahindra Holidays were traditionally managing the specific functions with multiple independent systems. For example it had independent systems to manage the customer relationships, timeshare management, financial management, HRMS, Budgeting, materials management etc. All these systems were built on different technologies and were not integrated. Information was downloaded from multiple systems and consolidated using MS Excel. As a result, the company was dealing with a lot of unstructured data and was not able to have control or an audit trail over the use of this data.
In order to keep pace with the growth in its business, MHRIL was looking at streamlining its IT operations to scale up and achieve better control over its business information. The company along with a leading consulting organization had to assess its IT needs and the solutions vendors needed.
Solution offered
After assessing multiple ERP solutions, MHRIL zeroed in on Microsoft Dynamics AX. Some of the factors considered during the selection process were comprehensiveness, ease for adaptability, customization and the ability to integrate with other solutions.
The financial management, supply chain and the projects backbone of Dynamics AX helped MHRIL streamline its operations relating to finance, complex income recognition processes, purchases, materials management, resorts development, sales and accounts receivables including EMI billing and collections process. Using the COM connectors of Dynamics AX, SIS integrated the solution with its timeshare management operations, CRM solution (Talisma) and its existing hospitality management solution.
Today, MHRIL has a comprehensive solution for handling all its back office operations in the form of Dynamics AX. Dynamics AX seamlessly integrates with Talisma which is used for the CRM operations and Timeshare ware which is used to manage the timeshares of MHRIL.
Challenges Faced
- Online two-way communication between Axapta and external CRM software- Talisma needed to be installed in order to establish effective and seamless integration.
- Provision for a system for managing the Post Dated Instruments (PDI) collected at different locations till the various stages of its lifecycle like vaulting, banking, realization and cancellation at a centralized location.
- The need to create a future-proof commission and incentive system for sales force and various external distribution channels with the flexibility for adopting any new method of calculation.
- Tender management and Running Account (RA) bill for work orders with the various advances and recoveries including ad-hoc payment and final payment.
Customer Benefits
The best implementation methodology available in the industry - Navision On Target Toolkit (OTT) has been followed. The implementation has provided well-integrated and real-time centralized information, which resulted in the following benefits:
- Online financial statements like balance sheet, income statement and budget vs. actuals etc
- Decreased amount of time required in daily operations, like PDI transferring, vaulting, banking, realizing and canceling.
- All the branches now operate from the same information system base, regardless of their location.
- All branches are connected to the network and the data is available online for retrieving/processing information.
- Relevant data is controlled at a central area and is common across all locations. E.g. common chart of accounts for all branches to operate upon.
For More Information
For more information about Sundaram Infotech’s Enterprise Solutions products and services, call +91-44-28604066, or visit www.sundaraminfotech.in
Contact Information
901-906, Raheja Towers
177, Anna Salai,
Chennai – 600002
India
http://www.sundaraminfotech.in
E-mail: info@sundaraminfotech.in
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