Mercedes-Benz has announced the launch of ‘SKYLine’, a ‘Made in India, for India’ bespoke end-to-end Dealer Management System (DMS) developed from the ground 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 represents a significant step towards managing our customer service operations, being a key lever that will significantly enhance customer’s experience. This bespoke DMS is built by Zoho for our dealer partners, making it seamless and highly integrated into our global systems, redefining customer journey. With SKYLine, we are setting a new benchmark in customer experience by blending technology with personalized service. We are proud that Zoho developed a world-class, highly secured and local ‘no code-no source’ platform like SKYLine for the Indian customers, underlining the unmatched prowess of Indian technological innovation, having international adaptability. SKYLine brings transparency, efficiency, and control into every service interaction, empowering customers, while delivering an elevated experience which they desire from Mercedes-Benz.”—Santosh Iyer, Managing Director & CEO at Mercedes-Benz India
“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.
