Carnation Auto chooses TCS to help create India’s first independent multi-brand automobile sales and service chain

Mumbai: Tata Consultancy Services today said that it has been chosen by Carnation Auto, a Jagdish Khattar initiative, to provide end-to-end system integration services. The multi-year agreement envisages TCS as the full service provider responsible for enterprise IT solution implementation and includes business consulting, technology implementation and support.

Carnation Auto is promoted by Jagdish Khattar, the former managing director and CEO of Maruti Suzuki, India’s largest passenger car company selling one in two cars in the domestic market. Carnation Auto is setting up a chain of multi-brand auto solutions and sales “hubs” with services like maintenance, insurance, CNG/LPG retrofitment, body and paint, accessories, DC Design, etc under one roof for various auto brands. Carnation will also retail new and certified pre-owned vehicles. It plans to set up approximately 100 multi-brand auto solution hubs in the next four years.

Mr Khattar, CMD, Carnation Auto said, “We are a young company but have eleven locations already operational, and another eight in the pipeline, so an accelerated rollout and rapid scalability of our services is critical for success. Our aim is to provide an alternative to car owners and pioneer the independent multi-brand automobile sales and service industry in India and we needed a technology partner who would create a transformational architecture to accelarate this process. TCS was the partner of choice, with its technical expertise and proven track record for innovatively compressing project time lines.”

Carnation would be heavily banking on technology to retain its key differentiation and reduce time-to-market. The IT infrastructure TCS is setting up would be scalable and integrated to include all aspects of auto retail and repair business like forecasting, inventory management, sales, HR, CRM, payroll, etc.

G Srinivasa Raghavan, country head, India business, TCS said, “We are happy to be associated with a growing brand which has a vision for ‘transforming’ the automobile industry. TCS will leverage its domain expertise and transformation capabilities to enable Carnation to meet its service roll out schedule. This partnership will pioneer significant changes in the automobile retail market space.”