About

For nearly 70 years, Detroit Diesel has been designing, manufacturing, selling and servicing diesel engines. Best known for its signature Series 60 engine, Detroit Diesel is a recognised global manufacturer that ships thousands of powerful, fuel-efficient engines to customers every year. Today, Detroit Diesel works with nearly 900 authorised distributor and dealer locations around the world and employs approximately 3,300 people, making its engines some of the most popular and top selling among heavy-duty trucks.

Challenge

With a wide selection of engines marketed across the world, it is important that Detroit Diesel customers have access to the most recent developments in diesel engine technology. Prior to RedDot, Detroit Diesel's service locations struggled for an easy way to retrieve service information within a central and secure online environment. At the time, there was no content management system where staff could organise and maintain the Detroit Diesel site to keep content fresh and current.

"There were no standard folders or a central filing system for storing content.  Everything was scattered all over the place," remembers Nishant Ghelani, Web Developer at Detroit Diesel.  "Also, there was no way to re-use graphics or logos on the site.  It was loosely structured and duplication of the same information was inevitable."

With no formal system in place for their Web site or Extranet, Web updates, such as online submission forms, were built with in-house technologies. If a change needed to be made to the Web site, contributors had to work in FrontPage and send their updates to IT. The IT department then reviewed the content for spelling and technical errors before sending it through publication.  Almost 30 contributors from different departments sent content update requests to IT and changes could take anywhere from one to three days to post on the site.

Solution

Detroit Diesel realised they needed to implement a Web content management system that would allow employees with little Web expertise to easily modify the Web site and Extranet without having to wait days to see their changes posted online. In order to make this happen, Detroit Diesel began to research Web content management vendors that fell within their requirements. "The content management arena was really new to us.  We had never explored anything like this in the past, so we were pretty 'green' to the process," explains Eric J. Pigeon, Manager of Service Communications at Detroit Diesel.

Detroit Diesel put together a cross-functional team that represented several company areas, including IT Services, Service Communications, Parts, Customer Support, Training and Warranty. Each department was asked to assess and provide the Web site requirements that were important to their teams. "Basically, my group and the IT department sat down with the vendors to determine what kind of services they could provide.  Cost was a big factor, as well as ease-of-use," says Pigeon.  "We were also interested in what type of support they could give us and how flexible they were going to be for our organisation during the long-haul."

For Detroit Diesel, one of the most important features that differentiated RedDot was the easy-to-use interface for people who would maintain the Web site on a daily basis. Pigeon emphasises, “We wanted to make sure that the folks who needed to contribute content could do it easily and didn’t have to be technically skilled in order to update the site.  Contributors have primary tasks within their own department, so updating the Web site is a supplementary responsibility."

Results

After selecting RedDot, Detroit Diesel began the process of migrating content from their current Detroit Diesel site to its new home. Eight months later, the diesel engine manufacturer rolled out its new service location Extranet, Detroit Diesel Customer Support Network (http://www.ddcsn.com/), for dealers, distributors, OEMs and employees. Users are greeted by a welcome page and can search for service, training, parts, warranty and customer support documentation based on their individual profile and user permissions.

DDCSN also provides integrated links to applications related to warranty, engine parts and other company information. Users can sign on once and access any number of externally hosted applications while navigating inside DDCSN’s standard look and feel.  Currently, Detroit Diesel has 25 application portals that connect to applications within and outside DDCSN, saving the IT staff significant development time and effort. 

Today, DDCSN receives approximately 52,000 visits per month and 1,700 visits per day from users logging into the system.  Commenting on DDCSN’s much improved navigation, Pigeon says, "Since launching DDCSN with RedDot, the user experience is much faster than what people were accustomed to in the past.  Before, it took several clicks just to find a service document or piece of related content.  Now, it takes two or three."

For Detroit Diesel, it is important that they are meeting customers’ demand for quick access to service information. Speaking on RedDot and its influence on Detroit Diesel’s content management process, Pigeon states, "The fact that RedDot takes IT out of the equation has been one of the biggest benefits. Contributors create the content and post it on the site without ever going to IT. It allows them to be responsive to the customers and makes the process much faster."

Since completing their initial RedDot implementation, Detroit Diesel has seen significant improvements in contributor training time and site usability. Ghelani remarks, “Our users find RedDot much simpler to use than the previous system they worked with in the past, especially when it comes to training. It only takes about an hour to get a user trained on the RedDot system and there are minimal complaints."

Detroit Diesel can also perform online tasks that they were unable to accomplish before, such as reusing content and graphics and placing expiration dates on pages to keep content up to date.  The workflow process has also significantly improved and sped up the time required for reviewing and approving content.

"My biggest philosophy about developing this site was to give our folks the tools they needed to do their jobs successfully," says Pigeon. "Eliminating our users’ frustration has helped us meet our goal and accomplish what we set out to do."