Mazda Deploys Plumtree Corporate Portal to Support 700 Dealerships In North America

Mazda Expects Portal Dashboard Application to Yield 100% ROI in First Six Months

SAN FRANCISCO, May 14 -- Enterprise Web technology leader Plumtree Software announced today that Mazda North America has deployed the Plumtree Corporate Portal for sales and customer service field managers overseeing Mazda's 700 North American dealerships. Mazda field managers are responsible for visiting each dealership in their territory at least four times a year to review performance and improve sales. The portal integrates into a dashboard application information and resources from diverse repositories including IBM DB2 mainframes and Microsoft Exchange, as well as Microsoft Excel financial reports, empowering managers to easily compare performance metrics of dealerships, identify growth opportunities and target areas for improvement. Using the Plumtree portal, regional managers can analyze consolidated data on both sales and customer support performance 24 hours a day and can track near real-time sales figures for all dealerships nation-wide. This dealer analysis application has decreased the time it takes to prepare for dealership visits and reviews by over 50%.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20000405/SFW002 )

"Before the portal we had no easy way to review all of the business indicators for both sales and service," said Jim DiMarzio, CIO of Mazda North America. "With these indicators centralized and Web enabled through the portal, our field managers can see vital information in context, can prepare better and faster for dealership visits, and we believe, are having more productive visits. Based on the savings we are already experiencing, we expect 100% ROI from the portal deployment in the first six months alone."

What's in Mazda's Portal?

To build the dealership application in the portal, Mazda integrated several systems into the portal. To integrate content from Excel financial reports alongside managers' e-mails, calendars and contact information from Exchange, Mazda is using the Plumtree Portal Framework for Microsoft Excel and Plumtree Portlet Suite for Microsoft Exchange. Mazda is also using Crawler Web Services to index information from business and industry news sources relevant to the field managers. The searchable document directory in Mazda's portal indexes resources including order, parts and customer retention reports, announcements from corporate headquarters, training manuals, and marketing collateral that were previously not accessible to field managers on the road.

Before the portal, Mazda's field managers spent up to three days collecting performance data from mainframe reports, spreadsheets, and third party analyses to prepare for a single dealership visit. Managers would print hundreds of pages of sales, support and customer care figures to analyze the dealer's performance and to compare it to the performance of other dealerships. After sorting through the paperwork and trying to determine current success and growth targets, the manager would haul the data to the dealership for the formal meeting.

Mazda deployed the Plumtree Corporate Portal to provide managers with easy access to the data they need for dealership reviews. Managers can also drill down into the detailed reports that feed the dashboard application. Through this dealer analysis application, managers view performance on the national, regional and local level for measurements including:

  -- Quarterly, monthly and weekly sales;
  -- Sales and services standard indexes;
  -- Rolling 12 month customer care ratings;
  -- Field expense summaries;
  -- Facility requirements;
  -- Goodwill after warranty;
  -- Parts inventory comparisons; and
  -- Recall reminder reports.

The portal has increased field managers' productivity and reduced printing and shipping costs. Mazda also believes that the portal has improved the quality of the manager visits to dealerships by providing a clearer analysis from which to start discussions between the dealerships and the field managers.

Plumtree Chosen for Open Architecture and Out-of-the-Box Functionality

Mazda chose Plumtree for its mature portal product with strong out-of-the- box functionality to integrate applications and manage content. These features allowed Mazda to plan, build and deploy the portal solution in under six months. Additionally, Mazda needed to integrate a wide range of systems running on various platforms, and to support programmers that write in both Java and ASP, which was supported by the Plumtree Corporate Portal's Web Services Architecture. The public can read more about Plumtree's Web Services Architecture at http://www.plumtree.com/products/platform/architecture.asp

About Plumtree Software

Plumtree Software is the Enterprise Web technology leader. Plumtree's mission is to create a comprehensive Web environment for employees, customers and partners across the enterprise to interact with different systems and work together. Plumtree's Enterprise Web solution consists of integration products for bringing resources from traditional systems together on the Web, foundation services such as collaboration, content management and search for building new Web applications, and a portal platform for delivering these Web applications to broad audiences. Plumtree's independence and its Web Services Architecture allow this solution to span rival platforms and systems, maximizing customers' return on their existing investments. With offices in more than a dozen countries, Plumtree has over 480 customers, including Boeing, Ford Motor Company, Procter & Gamble and the U.S. Navy.

NOTE: Plumtree is a registered trademark of Plumtree Software, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries in the US and/or other countries. All other registered and unregistered trademarks in this document are the sole property of their respective owners.

Photo: NewsCom: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20000405/SFW002
AP Archive: http://photoarchive.ap.org/
PRN Photo Desk, 1-888-776-6555 or +1-212-782-2840