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John Deere appreciates the difficulty of building a truly global presence.
Driven by its desire to build market share, this widely respected manufacturer
of agricultural, construction, forestry, and consumer equipment sought to reach
out to its worldwide customer base through localized online content. Using Interwoven
Enterprise Content Management (ECM), John Deere found a solution that not only
ensured a consistent look and feel across all of its global sites, but also
streamlined the content contribution process.
According to Lisa M. Smith, director of global eBusiness at John Deere, "In
our search for an ECM solution, we wanted to make sure the online content for
each region would reflect a consistent corporate image and content, but also
adapt to the local culture and market. Interwoven helped us meet this challenge
head-on, and we -- as well as our customers -- are delighted with the results."
The move proved to be extremely beneficial to John Deere's bottom line and
time-to-market. With the help of the Interwoven 5 ECM Platform, John Deere was
able to develop a content-rich portal, attracting over 160,000 unique visitors,
and serving up 1.5 million page views monthly. And in just twelve months, the
company was able to create five country-specific versions. As a result, John
Deere is now enjoying an average cost savings of 94 percent per country, and
an average time savings of 56 days per country. At the same time, the move enabled
all of the company's global subject-matter experts to actively contribute the
kind of product information that its customers need most to make informed purchasing
decisions.
"Our goal all along," notes Cary David, eBusiness Solutions Division
Manager at John Deere, "has been to get the people who know the products
connected to the customer. Our feeling is, when people have all of the information
they need, they'll make the choice to purchase John Deere. TeamSite is making
that happen for us."
Templates Make Content Entry Easy
One of the key reasons John Deere selected Interwoven's ECM platform was because
of its unparalleled templating capabilities. With more than 40,000 employees
worldwide, John Deere's content contributors are located in numerous locations
across the globe, and possess varying degrees of technical expertise. Approximately
70 marketing, advertising, product, and financial experts currently help develop
content for the agriculture portal -- but only a handful are HTML experts, says
David. It was therefore crucial that contributors be provided with a simple,
user-friendly mode of content entry. In addition, the company's global contributor
base required a standard format, which would protect the portal's look and feel
from country to country.
These mandates were easily addressed in TeamSite, according to David, who
notes, "We wanted to bring in content contributors throughout the Agriculture
Division who had the expert knowledge, and create and deploy content to improve
our customers' experience. But we didn't want our employees to have to be computer
jockeys. The best way to do that was through TeamSite templates."
"The templates also eliminated a lot of the issues we could have had with
worldwide Internet standards and guidelines," David adds. "We don't have to
worry about people creating different borders, or changing our look and feel.
The templates really help us provide consistency throughout our portal."
Why Not MetaTagger?
Another important reason that Interwoven was chosen was because of its MetaTagger
product, which automates the tagging process. From David's perspective, the
product has saved John Deere countless hours in organizing and cataloging its
data. In addition, by enabling contributors to reuse content, the company is
saving significant development costs. David is highly enthusiastic when talking
about the benefits of MetaTagger: "MetaTagger is definitely key to our whole
content management strategy," emphasizes David. "When we first set up our metadata,
we were going to go through and tag all of our content by hand. Then we started
doing the math, and estimated this manual process would cost the company approximately
ten minutes per page. We've now put MetaTagger into production. Once we're confident
that the tags are correct we'll turn on the automatic tagging, which will give
us the capability to tag our entire site in less than an hour. The key is this,
by having all of our content tagged we can reuse it, which saves us real money,"
David continues. "Customers can do searches and quickly get the information
they want. In our mind content syndication is the real power of the TeamSite
tool. In order to achieve global syndication it was imperative that every page
of content be tagged with metadata."
Workareas and Virtualization for Discrete Web Initiatives
TeamSite's workareas and virtualization were also especially beneficial to
John Deere, enabling contributors to add and edit content on their own desktops.
Each group of product experts, whom David notes typically work for the equipment
producing factories, develops content through a dedicated workarea which contains
a complete, virtual copy of the entire portal. This allows multiple contributors
to simultaneously develop and test changes in the context of the entire site
without affecting the integrity of each other's work, or the entire portal.
Says David: "We have a lot of engineering people who represent these factories, and they're contributing tips to us because they have the most in-depth knowledge about the products. We've created a workarea for each of these groups, where they can submit all of the tipsonce approved this content is then moved to the Internet."
Significant ROI
John Deere's Agricultural Equipment Division is enjoying a substantial return
on its TeamSite investment. Since implementing the solution, the company has
realized a 95 percent reuse rate for the sites' testing methodology, an 80 percent
reuse rate for the implementation of the project, and a 90 percent reuse rate
for documentation, customer training, and support for each site. In the case
of the Mexican site, says David, virtually all of the development was done by
John Deere employees who had no specific Web expertise. After a four-month development
phase for the first portal, the production schedule for subsequent versions
was compressed by as much as 56 days.
The Best Bet for Business
In addition to connecting teams of people from different divisions of the company,
users of every technical level can play an active role in contributing content.
"TeamSite is truly one of the most amazing software tools I've seen since
I've been working on Internet projects," David muses. "It's providing us with
a real opportunity to reach into our customers' homes and speak to them. We
want them to have perfect information. We also want to make our content contributors
as comfortable as we can, so they'll be more apt to contribute content. TeamSite's
essentially eliminated the need for dedicated IT developersand from a business
perspective, I love that."
John Deere Wins KM World's Best Practices Award
In April 2002, John Deere in partnership with Interwoven was awarded
KM World's Best Practice Award for its Global Online Presence. KM's Best Practices
program consists of a series of articles that highlight companies whose use
of technology serve as an example to help other organizations improve their
business processes, Click here to read the article.
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