| Overview |
Geographical diversity, multiple states, diverse cultures, different holidays, combination of local, state and national rules, regulations, taxes, and idiosyncrasies are the salient features of the Indian landscape that any OEM has to face. Creating a dealership management system catering to all possible diversities is a huge challenge that we have mastered through deep knowledge gained from tremendous amount of research.
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| Objective |
| The objective of this white paper is twofold. |
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To share our knowledge on the Indian Dealer information / network infrastructure and its challenges. |
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To showcase evolution of our product in meeting these challenges translating them into benefits for our customers.
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| Network & Connectivity Issues: |
Our deep experience has given us an opportunity to identify and tackle the following challenges/issues.
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 No single ISP across India. |
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There is no single Internet Service Provider across India that could provide services to all the locations. Different services provided and opted resulting in varied performance levels across India resulting in lack of standardization. |
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Network problems would require coordination with multiple service providers for any issue resolution. |
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Remote areas lack broadband connectivity. Resulting in sub standard dial up connections and connections through data cards. |
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Promised bandwidth by ISP’s is not delivered resulting in dissatisfaction among users for application due to lack of awareness. |
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Dealers are reluctant to invest in superior network connectivity (where available) as they are not able to see value for money.
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| Frequent downtimes |
| Frequent breakdown of connectivity due to various reasons causes dissatisfaction amongst the dealers as it brings down productivity. |
| Packet Losses |
| Data/packet losses during the data transfer from client machine to server induce authenticity risks of the data and the transaction. |
| Low configuration PC’s |
| In order to save on the Capex dealers end up buying lower grade hardware (PC’s) resulting in lower configuration than desired. |
| High Volumes = Lower performance |
| As the volumes of transactions increase the network bandwidth is not able to support the data flow from and to the server, compromising on the performance. |
| Accessibility issues for users on the move. |
Dealer personnel on the field (away from dealership premises) need to access the available data or create documents. As applications are not light/nimble enough to run on PDA’s this is a challenging task. In such cases the users are either deprived of access to the system or they have to create a manual document and then later enter the same into system causing duplication of work.
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| Old Practices |
In case of connectivity failures it was dependence on dial ups connections and also data transfers through courier in the form of Floppy disks, CD-ROMs etc.
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| AutoSol Solution |
The engineering team has continuously improved the capabilities of the product and has also envisaged a very nimble, simple yet robust architecture to meet the tough challenges posed in the Indian context.
“Smart client” -When connected through a browser the application downloads a binary file onto the Dealer / user PC. Most of the required components are cached into the dealer PC. This extremely nimble “smart client “equips the product to work in such trying conditions.
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| AutoSol’s Smart client technology allows the product to work with |
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Minimal bandwidth (Dial-ups, Data Cards) |
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Minimal data transfer needs – resulting in efficient network utilization by reduced server interaction, communication between client and server through custom compression logic requiring very minimal bandwidth. |
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Seamless ability to switch between networks while maintaining state always. In the event of an outage with an existing network all that the dealers need to do is use an alternate network to complete the transaction. (e.g. Data Card) |
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AutoSol works on a low bandwidth and requires minimum hardware infrastructure at the dealer end resulting in significant cost savings. |
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Client side binary facilitates higher security for mobile (PDA’s) users using public network with built-in security features like client certificates, active directory integrated authentication. |
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Screen rendering is done using cached XML layouts at the client machine with no round trips to server thus significantly faster than other HTML based web applications.
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| Summary |
| All the ISP’s in India are investing in kaizen which would result in better network infrastructure. However, we have focused our energies in equipping our product to work with these bottlenecks. This application is built on a robust, yet nimble architecture, that is fast, works on low bandwidths, can work with low grade hardware infrastructure, seamlessly switch networks without any data loss resulting in low total cost of ownership. We believe that we have a truly world class DMS solution. |
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