Mercedes-Benz India announced the launch of ‘SKYLine’, a ‘Made in India, for India’ bespoke end-to-end Dealer Management System (DMS)
developed grounds up, in partnership with Zoho. Built on Zoho CRM and implemented by Zoho’s
Enterprise Business Solutions (EBS) team, SKYLine redefines seamless customer journey by offering
unique customer benefits from vehicle reception to vehicle delivery. SKYLine combines dealer-level
autonomy with centrally governed processes, delivering a fully digitized and integrated platform across
Mercedes-Benz India’s nationwide dealership network, elevating customer ownership experience
significantly.
Designed to modernize operations and elevate customer experience, SKYLine digitizes the entire
service lifecycle from booking to delivery through real-time data integration, streamlined workflows,
and unified backend operations. The result is enhanced operational efficiency, transparency, and a
premium, brand-aligned experience for both customers and dealers.
Now live across all dealerships in India, SKYLine marks a transformational shift from legacy
infrastructure to a cutting-edge decentralized architecture. Each Mercedes-Benz dealership will now
operate on its own dedicated Zoho CRM instance, enabling autonomy while ensuring compliance with
centrally defined standards. SKYLine seamlessly integrates with Mercedes-Benz’s legacy HQ systems
without requiring any changes at the HQ end, enabled by a robust transformation layer co-developed
with Zoho to manage all downstream communication.
To achieve this vision, Mercedes-Benz India needed to balance dealership autonomy with OEM-level
control and enterprise-wide standardization while addressing the constraint of not modifying HQ
systems. Zoho addressed these requirements by co-creating a vertical, multi-instance architecture
powered by Zoho CRM and Qntrl, its workflow orchestration platform. The middleware layer,
developed in tandem with Qntrl, enables real-time synchronization across systems and regions by
supporting REST, SOAP, file-based, and other legacy protocols.
“SKYLine is a technology marvel born of close collaboration and co-creation. When Mercedes-Benz
India came to us with a vision that had no off-the-shelf solution, we saw an opportunity to build
something truly unique. Together, we have built a decentralized platform that empowers each
dealership with autonomy, while maintaining central control and real-time HQ integration. To meet
these complex needs, we co-developed middleware capabilities alongside our evolving Qntrl platform,
enabling seamless communication across legacy protocols. This project reflects what’s possible when
product teams and customers come together with a shared sense of purpose and a commitment to solving real-world challenges.” Mani Vembu, CEO, Zoho.
SKYLine now orchestrates the full spectrum of customer service processes comprising:
Service booking, digital check-in, vehicle inspection, real-time estimate approvals (to be activated
soon), job card creation, skill-based technician assignment, live job tracking, proactive communication,
quality control, and post-service feedback collection.
These connected workflows replace fragmented systems with a seamless, paperless customer
journey. Beyond service, SKYLine streamlines diverse dealership operations including courtesy car
management and pre-owned vehicle refurbishment and resale.
Dealerships can track courtesy car availability via a visual dashboard, while pre-owned workflows
centralize one of the fastest-growing business segments. Embedded analytics provide real-time
insights to both dealership managers and OEM stakeholders, enabling informed, data-driven
decisions.
The rollout was backed by over 5,000 man-days of user acceptance testing and 3,000 man-days of
training, ensuring strong adoption across all locations. Zoho EBS led the end-to-end delivery, from
design to post-implementation support, while engineering secure middleware integrations that
enabled seamless data exchange with Mercedes-Benz’s European HQ systems. This included
advanced data transformation, asynchronous processing, and multi-protocol communication, making
SKYLine one of the most technically complex and strategically significant DMS deployments in the
region.
