Avis-Europe case study
Requirements
Avis Group is a leading car rental company in Europe, Africa,
the Middle East and Asia, operating under an exclusive licence via
the globally recognised Avis and Budget brands.
The Avis brand operates via a network of over 3,100
locations in 107 countries, through wholly owned subsidiaries in 14
corporate countries complemented by licence arrangements in a
further 93 countries.
Avis-Europe wanted to give both its external website and
Intranet websites not only a new look and feel but also count on a
new platform that allowed them to easily add new content and to
manage their current information structure.
Considerable investment had been made to improve the company's
brand image at various customer touch points, including in the area
of online bookings, and the style guides established for this
needed to be taken through its online presence generally. Under the
previous publishing model different areas of the Avis web presence
were contributed to by different parties, primarily using a
Frontpage publishing model. Whilst there was some compliance with a
standard look and feel, there was a tendency for each publisher to
add their own variations – which over time resulted in a lot of
inconsistencies in styles and approaches.
An over reliance on the IT function was creating bottlenecks and
sucking up valuable resource that could be better spent elsewhere.
Their aim was to move a lot of the control and responsibilities for
the publishing process from IT to the business users themselves.
The challenge here was to ensure that the processes could be
handled easily by those with little or no technical expertise.
Solution
A Content Management System was the logical option. Due to the
nature of the company's business, the Intranet has a complicated
infrastructure with an Intranet and an Extranet closely
interlinked with many applications integrated into both
websites.
Therefore Avis needed a product flexible enough to meet its
requirements in terms of database, applications connectivity,
security and user access policy.
Why Immediacy?
Each IT provider undergoes a selection process involving both
the internal customer within Avis, (which in this case was the
Sales and Marketing and Investor Relations departments) and the IT
architecture department. They consider not only current features
but also if strategically the product will suit the company's
needs.
In this case, it was a joint decision by Avis UK and Avis Europe
and Immediacy was chosen because it has all the functionality we
required from a Content Management System at a reasonable
price.
Results
The deployment of Immediacy within Avis has been described as a
real 'eye opener', with many people within the business units
recognising that they do not need to be beholden to the IT function
to administer basic content publishing processes.
In terms of tangible cost savings, Avis reckon they will be
saving at least £20,000 per annum in printing costs by making
better use of the online channel for disseminating information to
key stakeholders such as investors.
In terms of resources, the time of around 5 IT people was being
used in the previous FrontPage publishing model to manage the
process of updating and deploying content to the live servers.
These technical and administrative functions are now handled by one
person within the business unit, with content creation and
publishing responsibilities devolved to other business unit people
where and when relevant.
This learning is now being applied with similar rapid deployment
for the Avis Europe Intranet and Extranet projects. A first phase
environment is already in place that follows elements of the styles
and templates established for the external site. Following a 'train
the trainer' approach that Immediacy encourages, regular training
is well underway amongst those who have a clear publishing remit. A
more ambitious stage involving the creation of a 'single sign on'
user personalised environment is planned for launch before the end
of this year.
In their own words, Avis-Europe describe their experiences with
implementing the Immediacy product:-
"We are really satisfied with Immediacy because it has all the
functionality already built-in, thus allowing us to develop our web
pages in a simple and straightforward way.
We developed our Avis-Europe Website using Immediacy and we
launched it on time and within budget. A great part of this success
has to be found in the collaboration we got from Immediacy in the
critical moments of the roll-out.
We have always experienced really good responses when we have
been faced with technical problems but it was especially important
with a tight go-live schedule and we counted on a direct support
line that worked perfectly.
As a conclusion, after our experience with Avis-Europe, when we
had to decide how to move forward with the implementation of our
current Intranet / Extranet Solution, we decided to use Immediacy
again for this larger project and we are very confident this
project will be as successful as the former one."
Implementation
The Avis-Europe site went live in June 2004 and was created and
implemented using Immediacy in just five weeks from the point of
purchase.
As well as supplying the content management software solution,
Immediacy provided help with template creation, trained the
developers and users and arranged the hosting for the site.
Features
These are some of the key Immediacy features activated on the
Avis sites:
- News + Archiving of news or other sections
- Page Live and Expiry Dates
- Metadata
- Word/Excel Import
- Form builder
- Calendaring
- Polls and surveys
- External database integration