BENGALURU: Piles of paperwork, manual approval for procurement of new buses or spare parts and raising bills — these are some of the many bureaucratic processes Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) aims to get rid of. The corporation is set to go paperless, and is working on creating a Enterprise Resource Planning software (ERP) with the help of an external consultant company. The digital workflow of three departments is being worked on at present- fleet management, inventory — including records of stock and supply, and finances.
Explaining what ERP will do for BMTC, one of the consultants, on condition of anonymity, says, “At present, if a depot manager wants to scrap an old bus, he has to fill a physical form, attach photos, inspect the vehicle and send it to the deputy mechanical engineer (DME) for approval or rejection. The DME will have a ton of scrap requests coming in regularly, and three to four weeks are lost by the time the engineer takes a call on the scrapping.”
“With an ERP, the depot manager will write a report and upload it on the software along with photos. This will include a digital checklist to be ticked off after inspection. The software will raise a scrap request with the DME, who will be sent constant reminders over SMS to accept, reject or ask for clarifications about the particular bus. Instead of one month, the response will come in two days,” she says.
The same will apply to fleet management, where the ERP software will tell each depot when they are running low on spare parts supply, raise requests for one depot to transfer a spare part to the other, remind the BMTC staff that a bus has reached its threshold of kilometers and needs to go in for maintenance.
“The finance section of the software will tell us how much money is going in and out, and generate revenue receipts. At the click of a button, the management will be able to tell how many kilometers the bus has travelled, how much has been spent on it till the day it is scrapped, why it was scrapped, etc,” the consultant adds.
Public relations officer of BMTC, Channabasappa, says, “Right now, all departments are working manually and in silos. The ERP will bring all departments under one internal software, be it for inventory, fleet management, finances, human resources, etc. The Intelligent Transport System (ITS) we already have in place for commuters, including GPS-enabled buses and the BMTC app, will be integrated with this. This will put an end to duplication,manual errors in recording data and make us more
efficient. This will be done one department at a time and will take a year to see implementation.”
“The external consultant is preparing a digital workflow and studying our requirements. Based on this, they will tell us how our ERP needs to look. We will call for tenders later on, for a technical consultant to create an software,” Channabasappa adds.
Most private companies use ERP to make their functions digital. Popular examples are companies such as SAP and Oracle, who make enterprise application software for other businesses.
Commenting on the same, Hemant Dabke, vice president — Strategic Industries of SAP Indian subcontinent, says, “The potential business benefits of moving to a single, integrated ERP platform are significant. Metropolitan and state transport corporations across the world are witnessing an increase in revenue and customer satisfaction. For instance, we are working with Delhi Metro and Maharashtra Metro Rail Corporations on the same “
“For BMTC, we recommend the following areas where value can be created through ERP implementation. These include investment and financing, operations and asset management, multichannel sales with smart ticketing, customer service and interaction and real estate management,” he adds.