one for all
Who are they?
Europcar is one of the leading global car rental companies. Founded in Paris in 1949, the company today operates a fleet of over 250,000 quality vehicles at 2977 locations in 170 different countries covering Europe, The Middle East, Africa, Indian Ocean, Central America, Mexico, Caribbean and Asia-Pacific.
What they wanted
Europcar were looking for a company who could develop and deliver an intranet solution to enable better communication between their headquarters and rental stations.
With no current intranet solution in place there were no legacy issues to deal with, and no restrictions on technology choice. The main decision factors on the technology choice were cost and ease of use.
After looking at the choices on offer in the Content Management System market, they had decided to look at open source systems based on the Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP model as this would offer low cost of ownership, combined with proven reliability and flexibility.
Europcar held initial discussions with a couple of companies, from which they chose Foxsoft because they felt we offered their ideal of mutual development and knowledge sharing that would maximise the amount of development for the lowest cost. The use of TYPO3 was a big factor too because it met all aspects of their intranet requirements.
How we did it
In conjunction with their marketing department we developed a visual design consistent with their brand objectives and which worked on a range of screen resolutions.
We then worked closely with their in-house IT team to design an easily navigable page structure that met with approval from all departments. We configured TYPO3 on their servers for serving several thousand pages of information, set up multiple levels of permissions for users who would edit content as well as logins for all staff who would have access to protected content.
We configured and customised several publicly available extensions, e.g. for managing the latest news, and also developed several custom extensions;
- A Rental Station Directory
- A Staff Directory (including data import facilities to keep these both up to date from other internal disparate systems)
- Current Projects Status - a dashboard overview of current company projects for select staff to access
Finally we provided training to their internal training team, who then cascaded it to other staff.
In 2008 Europcar came back to us to redesign their intranet following their merger with National Car Rental. This was predominantly a re-branding exercise but we took the opportunity to modernise the html and css. A few changes were also made to the directories and the home page to include events and notices.
Project highlights
Our agile methodology allowed time savings to the project plan to be made which reduced the cost of the project compared to original estimates.
On the first live day, the intranet had 10,000 hits and has since served over 300,000 pages successfully (and by now that figure is probably well into the millions).