Interviews

Shanrohi Technologies leverages Oracle’s global network for expansion

India’s automotive sector currently contributes 7.1% of the country’s entire GDP. Given its substantial share, the potential business for the automotive service industry is evidently sizeable, presently worth Rs. 34,000 crores. Research suggests that driven by online platforms, the car services and repairs market is expected to reach $25 billion by 2030. However, the Indian car services and repairs market is currently quite fragmented.

70-80% of all vehicles on road today are serviced by individuals or multi-brand workshops making it one of the largest business sectors in the country. The industry is also growing at a rate of about 10% per annum. The industry has its set of issues including job card preparation and estimates, workforce allotment, job status tracking, spare part procurement, billing and invoicing, proper utilization of manpower and material, payments, vehicle history, client history, client communication, promotions, offers amongst many other things.

The need for technology platforms for building quality and affordable solutions is at an all-time high given the imminent demand. Auto companies are realizing the importance of digitization to help them streamline processes and provide a quality customer experience.

Recognizing the need for a solution in this field, Hyderabad-based Shanrohi Technologies launched RAMP, an integrated garage management software. The aim behind this is to rapidly cut down on admin time so that auto companies can focus more on fixing automobiles, generating revenue and creating a valuable experience for the customer.

The platform provides a range of services including automated backups, generates relevant reports, provides customer data statistics, can be used as booking diary, CRM, vendor management, inventory management amongst other things. To further scale their business and address growing customer demand, Shanrohi decided to deploy Oracle Cloud Infrastructure – to get maximum benefits on cost and product performance efficiencies.

With this context, Mr. Rakesh Biswal, founder of Shanrohi Technologies, in a discussion with CXOToday shared more insights on the same.

 

What are the trends in the automotive sector with specific reference to services in the automotive industry?

The automotive sector is seeing trends in various areas ranging from the electrification of vehicles to the digitization of the whole industry. This means we will be witnessing a connected auto industry very soon, where every stakeholder of this industry is connected with the other. The external IoT devices have also started giving way to inbuilt devices within the vehicle. Multi-lingual voice-based digital assistants will be the key feature in every sector of this industry. Augmented reality and virtual reality-based solutions are picking up within the automotive industry which find applications while buying a new vehicle, training technicians etc.

Another trend being observed is in the ownership of the vehicle where people are moving towards leasing the vehicle rather than owning it. Leasing is at a very nascent stage in India but is projected to go up pretty soon. In a similar context, shared mobility is also picking up where more and more people look for sharing the vehicle in terms of carpooling, ride-sharing etc.

In near future, the automobile will eventually become a software offering, with a standard body structure in place and that’s where we can see the Apples and Googles of the world getting into vehicle manufacturing, apart from the traditional automakers of the world like the Fords and Toyotas.

 

What are the key technology trends that are impacting the automotive service industry? Pls elaborate on what role the cloud plays in the overall scheme of things

The automotive industry right now is deeply impacted by key technology trends like AI in form of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to create effective voice-based applications, and build predictive and prescriptive analytics to ensure the proper health of vehicles and businesses. To build analytics, data has to be at a central secured location for easy handling and that is where the cloud infrastructure comes into the picture.  More than managing the servers and the data, the solution providers of the world do look for various tech expertise that can be provided over the cloud. This helps companies, mostly start-ups, operate on a bootstrap mode with the added advantage of trying out various technologies to offer the best and quality solutions to the customers.

 

How is RAMP helping the automotive sector?

RAMP is the world’s first integrated digital platform for the automotive industry consisting of an integrated suite of solutions provided to customers and consumers, to enable them with digital business process management, data standardization and business intelligence, with a focus on the Automotive Industry worldwide. RAMP is a smart platform designed and loaded to address the current and future technology revolution that the automobile industry is witnessing or is going to witness (connected CARs, EV adoption and many more).

RAMP includes solutions catering to both retail and enterprise customers across 20+ Global Markets.  The solution is capable of handling businesses ranging from small scale to large scale corporations. Having a tech stack to operate on a SaaS subscription model, RAMP is flexible to be accessed remotely, through its Cloud infrastructure. RAMP integrates all the stakeholders of the industry ranging from vehicle owners, fleet owners, vehicle dealers, pre-owned car dealers, OEMs, insurance companies, garages, vehicle leasing companies and many more, and enables transactions among these stakeholders. Thus, RAMP provides end-to-end vehicle life cycle management, putting every service related to a vehicle just a click away from the sales lot to the scrap yard.

Some examples of use cases that RAMP solves for different stakeholders are –

  • Vehicle Owner – Buy/Sell Vehicle, Avail RTO/RSA/Insurance services, Order Accessories/Tyres/Batteries etc, Avail servicing and many more.
  • Garages – Manage Internal Business Operations (CRM/Billing/Inventory etc), Avail insurance services, Order spares/lubricants/paints, connect with the vehicle owners etc, and many more.
  • Fleet Owners – Manage fleet, fleet’s maintenance, driver behaviour, telematic services, ordering spare parts, availing insurance services etc and many more
  • Vehicle Leasing Companies – Manage fleet procurement, lease & sub-lease of vehicles, their maintenance & other transactions- complete lifecycle of the Fleet for Enterprise Clients. Focus on Fleet Utilization, Productivity and Optimization

 

Few functions of the RAMP platform are provided below –

  • Seamless interaction between stakeholders, Connected Solutions & Businesses- Unified Business Strategy
  • Improves data standardization, data security, data ownership, transparency, accountability and control
  • Improves repeat business, customer retention and customer satisfaction
  • Improve Time to Market and Go to Market- launch within minutes in various markets
  • Remotely accessible SaaS solution
  • Easy traceability and monitoring functions across the platform
  • Focus on the savings of the Customer Organizations’
  • BI even for the smallest of businesses, where their customers are a priority
  • Multi-level exclusive ecosystems to operate & internal sub-ecosystems to leverage

 

How is Shanrohi Technologies leveraging Oracle Cloud infrastructure to improve customer experience? Pls elaborate on business benefits realized

RAMP’s digital platform offerings are SaaS-based and hence cloud infrastructure was the ideal and automatic choice to leverage in order to scale fast and provide high performance-driven solutions. Because the RAMP platform is built on the MySQL database, and OCI is tuned for MySQL performance, OCI became an obvious choice for Shanrohi. Both performance and cost were key reasons to shift to OCI.

The cost savings helped Shanrohi to provide extended trial instances to our customers and also created opportunities to explore various other cloud offerings by Oracle that can help our customers conduct their business effectively.

In addition, Oracle offered dedicated tech support for addressing all technical queries without a more expensive support plan, further tilting the scales in favor of OCI.

Considering these factors, after a month of exploring OCI, Shanrohi decided to move to Oracle Cloud in a phased manner by initially moving the internal tools and a few product and client instances.

 

How is Shanrohi Technologies planning to further expand its business?

Shanrohi Technologies has an ambitious and aggressive plan in place to create a niche for itself in the automotive sector. In the next 5 years, it plans to integrate almost every stakeholder of the automotive industry in India. Efforts are being made to make “RAMP” synonymous with the automotive industry.

We are also increasing our global presence and using Oracle’s extensive global network of Cloud Regions, the company has already expanded to the Middle East and African countries and is confident of expanding to other geographies soon.

Leveraging more of OCI’s offerings, Shanrohi is doing research and development around natural language processing to build conversational applications for customers. Shanrohi had created a business intelligence and analytics module in RAMP for a few initial stakeholders, but with OCI built-in analytics, the company can provide real time analytics to its customers.

 

 

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