On the MG-Rover site, drivers are urged to "live for the moment." Now the car company lives up to that motto with a new content management system (CMS)-driven dealer extranet that not only keeps dealer information "up to the moment" but also is reaping a quick return on investment and saving inordinate productivity costs.

MG-Rover had been outsourcing its dealer extranet, which was costly and required all Web information to be hand-coded and sent to the outsourcer. As a result, new information sometimes took up to four days to get live. This time lag led to inaccurate information on the site, and eventually, dealers stopped using it. With no efficient way to communicate the latest information on new models, sales offers, finance information and other marketing-based collateral, MG-Rover knew it needed to find a better alternative.

The company decided to implement Stellent’s Universal Content Management System, and has never looked back. The CMS took just six weeks to deploy, and already the company is seeing concrete benefits. Now, when a new sales incentive or car model is launched, MG’s marketing staff can use their typical desktop applications to create dealer materials and then publish them instantly to the extranet, where they can reside in HTML or PDF formats. The company said the Stellent system makes publishing fairly automatic, reducing the typical publishing cycle from days to just minutes.

Then, dealers can simply logon to the extranet, using their secure username and password, to access the latest materials for download, including images, after-sales literature and a fully searchable database of reference material.

"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 U.K., 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."

Not only has the project made the dealers happy, Thompson said it has saved costs and quickly reaped a significant ROI.

"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% for our internal marketing staff."

Thompson said Stellent’s version control features help MG-Rover keep the dealer content fresh as well as ensure that all information is electronically archived, easing document access. 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, he said.