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MG Rover Launches Dealer Extranet Powered by Stellent
Stellent announced today that MG Rover Retail, the United Kingdom sales operation for MG cars, has launched a Stellent-powered, nationwide dealer extranet to provide MG Rover’s 1,000 outlets and 4,000 sales representatives with critical information on new models, sales offers, finance information and other marketing-based collateral.
The new system, powered by Stellent® Universal Content Management, enables MG Rover’s marketing team to easily, instantly publish information onto the extranet in HTML and PDF formats using common desktop applications. This automation reduces the typical publishing cycle from the two to four days required using the old, outsourced site to minutes with the new, centrally-managed system.
“Migrating our extranet to the Stellent system has resulted in a streamlined Web publishing process, happy dealers and reduced costs,” said Steve Thompson, intranet and e-business projects manager for MG Rover. ”The site has been well-received by our dealers across the UK, rejuvenating interest in what was becoming a beleaguered and underused information source. Dealers have embraced the system and are even requesting additional functionality and services.”
MG Rover’s extranet was developed within six weeks, which included a seamless transition from the existing content and infrastructure to the new system – key metrics for the success of the project. Each individual dealer now has a secure username and password giving them access to a range of materials for download, including images, after-sales literature and a fully searchable database of reference material.
“The project is already proving a great success for us both in terms of delivering real value to our dealers and allowing us to be more responsive to their needs,” Thompson said. “The project has remained on-time and cash-positive throughout, and is already well on track for meeting our hard business targets of ROI within six months and year-on-year productivity savings of 75 percent for our internal marketing staff.”
Reducing time-consuming publishing cycles and minimising costly Web development were primary drivers for MG Rover’s extranet implementation. Previous attempts to bring this content to the Web had proved expensive to implement because they required Web content to be hand-coded; with Stellent, content is automatically converted to the appropriate Web formats for simplified publishing to the Web, so users can easily contribute content from the native desktop applications they utilize on a daily basis. Additionally, Stellent’s version control feature enables MG Rover to ensure only the current version of a document is published to the site while maintaining each previous version for archiving purposes. Before Stellent, old documents and inaccurate information remained accessible via MG Rover’s site due to a lack of controls, and hard copy reference files were kept to retain consistency and maintain an audit trail of changes to the content.
“From the outset, Stellent and MG Rover shared the same vision for what the dealer communications network could become,” said Bryan Richter, vice president of Europe, Middle East and Africa for Stellent. “Together we built a business case for how a centralised content management approach could save the company money and improve customer service to the dealer network. These hard business metrics are already being met, and feedback shows dealers agree MG Rover has made a shrewd investment in a vital area.” 06.02.2004, Stellent GmbH
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