Hendy Group Limited

Company details:

The Hendy Group is the the premier family run motor group and Britain's first Ford dealer.

The Hendy Group franchises cover Ford, Mazda, Honda and Kia, Ford Commercial and Iveco supplying top quality vehicles, service, body repair and parts for all vehicles and our Car Supermarkets have a huge range of pre-owned vehicles at fantastic prices.

Project Breif:

• Design and develop fast, secure eCommerce sites with a custom powerful shopping cart
• Design and develop the Centralised Parts Ordering System
• Design and develop the Hendy Intranet site
• To manage the telemarketing system and coordinate the 08* numbers for the group
• Create, develop and maintain the Hendy Group Forms site whcih enables the employees of the Hendy Group to coordiante their recruitment processes, Logisitcs movement, special offer and website content update, parts catalogue input, employee hire request using asp programming.
• Manage new technology systems within the dealership, including foyer marketing systems.

Result:

Hendy Parts Limited use Firestorm for both internal web solutions and external eCommerce websites.

The eCommerce sites, Hendy Performance and Hendy eShop, have been built to a bespoke design and structure specific to the requirements of the Motor Parts industry.
The sites work on the same framework but have very different look and feel about them to reflect the different customer base they are aimed at.

The Hendy Performance site is based towards customers who buy high end performance parts to enhance their vehicle inside and out.  The design brief was to make the site appealing to these users taking on the use of dark backgrounds and high on the use of images throughout the site.

The Hendy eShop site is based towards customers who are after the more standard parts and accessories for their vehicles, so the design was closely based on the main Hendy Group website creating a familiar look and feel to the site.

The custom shopping cart system handles several different sales options with voucher codes and product specific codes, along with specific product discounts.  VAT and shipping rates are also set within the eCMS.  PayPal and the BarclayCard ePDQ solutions have been used on the site for their payment gateways.

Both websites are run on the Firestorm eCMS platform which allows a huge amount of control to the company.  Uploading of the products through either a CSV file which can be maintained through a spreadsheet desktop software such as Microsoft Excel, or via the eCMS itself.  As both the sites are run on the same base platform products can be transferred between the sites without any issues.

Hendy Parts also approached Firestorm to create a Centralised Parts Ordering System (CPOS) for internal use in ordering parts throughout the group.  Prior to this being done all orders were done on multiple spreadsheets and placed on an internal system but there was a lot of paper and emails going between locations which was logistically horrid to manage.  The solution was to create a website interface where the orders were placed and then specific screens created with the necessary editing and updating required for each department processing the order.  A review of the order is constantly available in a separate screen throughout the order process and reports are available for download at any time.  The site is now integral to the parts ordering of the group and takes up to 200 orders a day.

The Hendy Forms website is used on a daily basis by all staff with amazing results assisting the movement of vehicles within the group via the Logistics Movement form, and the Approval to Recruit form has enabled both Group managers and the HR department to keep better control over the recruitment process.

The most recent project which Firestorm has undertaken for the Group is to re-develop their Intranet website. The intranet website is used daily by all the staff within the Group, using it to access their main personal information and booking holidays, accessing important website for day to day contact with all the main Manufacturers and companies which the Group deal with on a daily basis to what news and events and going on around the group.  It was important for the site to have a look and feel of the main Hendy Group website, but to be easily navigated round.  The wish was to have the internal company side of things to be kept fun and informal,  but the more important company aspects to have the correct look and feel as would be expected of a group this size.

The CMS was to have a lot of new and bespoke elements added to it, but making sure that it was easy to maintain and control at the same time.  Alerts and embedding of PDF documents into pages are just a couple of elements that have been developed into the websites structure along with live Twitter and Facebook API's broadcastings the latest information from the social networking sites.

The new intranet site has been well received throughout the group with staff commenting on how easy it is to navigate to the information which they need and enjoying the direct information available through the site.

New developments are constantly being actioned with both the websites and marketing for the Hendy Group, making this an exciting project to be involved with.

 

Visit the Hendy eShop website and Hendy performance website