Who they are
About Kia India
Kia India’s head office field operations team is eight people. Behind them sits a field force of roughly 110 area managers, about 40 for after-sales, 10 for customer experience and 60 for sales. Each responsible for 10 to 15 dealer sites. The team monitors dealer operations and performance, plans workshop expansions and handles customer complaints, against a long list of KPIs at every site. “We are a very lean organisation,” says Mir Saad Ajaz, who heads field operations from head office. “We have to use systems to support us.”
Before AutoSmart
The challenge
Kia India’s field operations team monitors dealer standards across 500+ centres with a lean head office team and around 110 area managers. Before AutoSmart, all of it ran on spreadsheets. Here is what made their monitoring process slow, manual, and hard to see across the network:
No Visibility
Dealer monitoring ran on Excel files emailed to dealers and chased on the same chain mail. Head office could not see what was going well or badly across the network without compiling reports by hand.
Slow Evaluation
Assessing a nationwide program such as the Workshop Enhancement Program took around two weeks.
Overloaded Area Managers
With 10–15 workshops each and dozens of KPIs per site, checking everything on every visit was not possible. A full parts-operations review alone took a day, sometimes two, on site.
A Static Record, Not a Live View
Completed files went into a small internal system as a repository. A record after the fact, not something the team could act on in real time.
How we worked
What we did together
Kia India piloted AutoSmart Audit in November–December 2025 and reached network-wide use within one month. Leadership joined the pilot calls from the start, and area managers helped shape the configuration before it was rolled out to them, so the platform was owned at the top and built with the field rather than pushed onto it. AutoSmart sat in on every training as the subject-matter expert on the system, while Kia India owned the process. Anything the platform could not yet do went onto an enhancement list, more than 20 additions have shipped since, and the Managing Director now reviews adoption across departments and regions every quarter.
The outcome
The results
2 weeks → 2–3 days
Nationwide program evaluation
1,100+
Field users moved off Excel
1 month
From pilot to network-wide use
Kia India replaced spreadsheets and email chains with one platform across after-sales, sales and customer experience. Evaluating every parameter of the Workshop Enhancement Program across the country dropped from around two weeks to two or three days – and the head office team gained visibility it never had before.
What changed
- Nationwide program evaluation dropped from around two weeks to two or three days.
- Visibility it never had: what is going well and what is not is now recorded live for every centre, with no waiting on compiled reports.
- Objective, consistent standards: every area manager assesses every dealership on the same scale, with time-bound action plans attached to each finding.
- Chronic problems flagged: repeat failures across cycles are visible without manual comparison.
- Dealer self-assessment: dealers complete assessments with evidence, so the area manager arrives already knowing the weak areas – turning a full-day parts review into a shorter, focused visit.
- Insight that creates programs: the DPF customer-education audit exposed which dealers and regions were struggling, shaping a new set of customer-education initiatives Kia India had no way to check before.
