I met the CIO of Tesla motors, Jay Vijayan, a few weeks ago on a small social gathering. Very smart man. He told us a great story of how in 2012 they were initially planning to use SAP as their ERP tool, and found that very unwieldy, bloated and expensive. For a company that is just delivering its first set of cars, an Enterprise implementation of SAP seemed like an overkill, and it needs an army of overpaid SAP experts to develop and support it.
So Elon summons his new VP of software engineering, who he personally recruited from Cisco (I think), to look into the option of developing a home grown tailored ERP system. Jay thinks that it is risky and so do the other senior IT executives . So next, Elon summons everyone, and tell them to get going on developing the software in 3 months and instructs everyone to give their full support to Jay. No one opens their mouth.
With the first production car only 4 months away, a task of assembling a team of developers and support specialist and then developing the ERP system seemed pretty daunting for Mr. Vijayan, but nevertheless he does not have a choice. He hand recruited the entire team through his network of contacts and friends, and they pulled in long hours, weekends and finally pulled it off.
In this day and age, even IT companies most often end up buying off the shelf solutions. For an automobile company to build a ground up ERP package isn't easy. But sometimes off the shelf enterprise level software like SAP, Oracle and such are behemoths, and will pull your IT budget down and is an overkill when you are just getting started. Vijayan was since promoted to CIO.
I hope Vijayan is looking into Salesforce.com component to identify why the inventory/loaner cars are not showing up consistently across various service centers. Better still they should look into the option of making that inventory list available on their website, so that anyone can browse and instantly make a reservation. So one should be able to see what is available and what is reserved.