Scania is one of the world's leading manufacturers of heavy trucks, buses and engines. It is a truly global corporation, operating in about 100 countries across Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa and Australia. It is the most profitable company in its sector, with more than 28,000 employees and production facilities in Europe and Latin America.
Challenges: a global Web marketing communications platform
The Scania brand has built a strong identity and brand over the years by delivering top quality vehicles and services since the 1940s.
Scania sells through a worldwide channel of distributors and dealers, all with their own online strategy, so managing the corporate brand and implementing effective coordinated marketing communications through this vast channel has traditionally been a challenge.
From the start, Scania wanted an online solution that offered cost effective communication to build a truly global presence while allowing a locally tailored approach and market share expansion. Scania realized that the solution lay in the establishment of a global Web marketing communications platform.
Benefits: integrated communications
Scania chose SDL Tridion's software solution for its online activities because of its globalization capabilities. It was decided that such a platform would promote the Scania brand through integrated communications and support coordinated distribution of services and content on the Internet.
SDL Tridion lets Scania maintain a central BluePrint that ensures global consistency, while providing distributors and dealers an easy-to-use tool for publishing and managing local content.
They can easily share and reuse components and content from the central site and publish it to their national sites. The result is a network of Web sites that meet not only the internal needs of corporate brand managers and local distributors and dealers, but more importantly, the needs of Scania customers.
The main strategy was to work on the different country sites. The look and feel is determined centrally and templates are provided locally. A central repository of images – shared across the many country and distributor and dealer Web sites (which are micro sites within the national sites) provides coherent and consistent branding. To help ensure efficient development across countries, Scania provides each distributor with a toolkit that has proven implementation techniques.
Proof: increased efficiencies
With the SDL Tridion solution, the toolkit and corporate-provided training, distributors are typically able to develop and launch extensive national sites within weeks. No specific Web skills are required of the distributors.
The solution increases distributors' efficiency by making it easier for customers to do business with Scania. The national site assembles all Scania activities and relevant information for that country and gives customers easy access to the details about the entire country sales and services network.
To date, Scania has used the SDL Tridion system to create and launch distributor sites in nearly 40 countries as well as for the corporate dot com site. "We have now established a platform that will enable us to further grow our business and increase customer value. To further build on this it is important that the online strategy goes hand in hand with our business and brand strategy" says Ulf Ceder, Manager Online Business Communication.
"Currently we are investigating further reuse of our content, not only to online channels but also towards print for manuals and brochures. Other possibilities include extending our fleet management services by offering targeted content to the drivers of our trucks, as most of our trucks are capable of receiving, sending and displaying information via wireless connections," Ceder concludes.
