Land Rover Jaguar website puts people power in portal
1 min read
Late last year saw the launch of Land Rover and Jaguar's 'People Solutions' portal, a novel initiative aimed at ensuring that its franchised dealerships become closer and better extensions of the OEM, and that its brand management shines.
It's a major leap over most companies' current practice of manuals, CDs, phone and meetings – instead providing web-based relationship management and interactive searchable information for dealers' key people, covering HR and people management in particular. So good is it that it scooped the 'Excellence in HR through Technology' award at the annual HR industry Oscars.
Alice Jones, programme manager at Land Rover Jaguar Academy which set up the initiative, says: "The motor industry is facing a lot of challenges at the moment so we need to do everything we can to make sure that our franchises attract and look after employees of choice, so that they can offer the very best of customer service."
Part of that is about ensuring a good working environment in line with modern best practice and that adheres to employment legislation. "We've invested a lot in our cars and our premises, so we need to invest in our people. There's a direct correlation between the satisfaction levels of staff and the level of customer service they give."
Recent research indicates that 90% of SMEs are not fully compliant with employment law, often due to limited HR knowledge. The Land Rover Jaguar portal provides a complete HR resource, with best practice and legislation information aimed at non-HR professionals.
The website was designed and built in conjunction with Warwick-based Freestyle New Media Group (FSNM), a project that included the development of the content management tools and systems for Land Rover Jaguar Academy to run, and the look and feel of the site.
Jones says that from concept to delivery took "a very small team" less than two years, with the assistance of FSNM, at a cost of well under £100,000 – a figure she points out is very small indeed compared with the positive and negative business potential from distributors' service people. "It's been rolled out to all our UK dealerships, so that's 100 Jaguar and 130 Land Rover dealerships.
From a systems point of view, it sits on the existing Land Rover Jaguar e-business platform, recently upgraded, which provides all the applications and tools for delivery of all information, analysis and transactions for the UK franchises, with branding opportunities and the rest.
It's based on Active Server Pages using IAS5 and runs under NT Windows 2000 Server with a SQL 2000 database on a Dell PowerEdge twin processor using XML and XSLTS to provide data consistency across the modules.
