The business case

Audi had an existing portal solution which has been built on an open source solution.. Audi's business had outgrown this solution which had become unreliable and required a lot of technical management. Audi only has one inhouse IT staff member, and needed a solution which could be administered and maintained by non-technical staff, without intervention from a third party supplier.

"The old portal wasn't letting us provide all the information we wanted to the dealers. We just couldn't update it frequently enough," said Vaross. "Administration of the old site wasn't easy - to make changes we had to get a programmer to do it. The software might have been free initially but we didn't have the expertise to support it in house, and we didn't want to keep paying someone outside the company to maintain it."

Audi was also very conscious of security concerns.

"Permission levels and security were quite important for us," explained Vaross. "The old portal wasn't 100% reliable - sometimes dealers couldn't access their own documents, and we didn't know why that was happening.

"We needed to ensure the correct information was reliably available to our dealers, and that dealers felt confident the confidential business data we were sharing with them online was only being shown to them."

Solution design and deployment

Audi began investigating its portal requirements in March 2008, and through working with its technology service partner, Ethan Group, was introduced to iD. Audi evaluated two products as part of the review, and chose the iD solution because it was able to deliver all the features they required out of the box - including security, self registration of accounts, document management, news, right hand navigation, image and digital asset libraries and flexible design, at a price that was within Audi's budget. The other solution which Audi evaluated was more expensive and would have required the purchase of additional modules to match what iD could provide out of the box.

The Audi dealer portal was launched to dealers in February 2009. The implementation and rollout of the project was delivered seamlessly. Prior to the implementation, iD worked with Audi staff to help the company decide what information needed to appear on the dealer portal, and how the permissions structure would work to ensure easy and secure access for dealers.

As part of the implementation, Audi involved the general managers from across five key departments including sales, corporate communications and finance to find out what information they needed to share with dealers. This ensured that the broader business would be involved in creating and maintaining the dealer portal and had buy-in of the project. "The preparation process that iD took us through made it easy -- they gave us an understanding of how to structure it," said Vaross.

iD trained five people from Audi -- one from each of the relevant departments -- to become administrators of the portal.

"We prefer to have one person from each department taking responsibility for their part of the dealer portal," said Vaross. "I'm an IT person and I don't know what dealers need to know. Plus my busy schedule creates a roadblock to getting the information updated quickly."

Audi completed two workshops with iD to finesse the structure of the portal. The company knew it was important to ensure the permission-based structure mapped closely to the information that different roles within the dealerships needed to access, in as quick and simple a way as possible.

"Now when someone from a dealership logs in, they'll see the latest news relevant to them, and it will only take one mouse click for them to find what they're looking for. It was important to give them the easiest possible route to the information they need."

The iD Desktop Assistant tool made administration of the site easy, said Vaross. The Desktop Assistant provides administrators with instant access to new items requiring approval before publishing on the site. It also gives them the ability to upload multiple files at the same time. For Audi this meant that each administrator only needs to access one folder relevant to their section of the business. "The after sales administrator only sees the parts of the portal that he needs to administer," explained Vaross.

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