Even an industry giant must constantly innovate new lines of revenue to fuel growth. Dion Beuckman, Department Manager of IT, outlined how Enterprise Holdings has expanded its Enterprise Rideshare business using worksocial technology to deliver the operational excellence it needs and the service excellence its customers expect.
Enterprise Holdings is the largest car rental provider in the world. It's a family-owned business that operates the Alamo, Enterprise, and National brands. Dion Beuckman, our speaker today, is responsible for the strategy and execution of systems supporting Enterprise's Rideshare business.
Enterprise Rideshare provides an alternative commute solution for groups of 5+ people who live in the same general area and commute 20+ miles each way to a common workplace. The average vanpool saves each participant $800 a month, reduces 12,500 pounds of CO2 a month, and frees up 8 parking spots.
Enterprise's vision was to build a comprehensive solution to drive the efficient operation & continued growth of the Rideshare business. There are two primary components to Rideshare:
- Rideshare System -- Employee-facing solution built on Appian
- EnterpriseRideshare.com -- Customer-facing website
Enterprise planned to allow easy vehicle management and rental transactions for employees, and enable full self-service vanpool management for customers.
Enterprise faced many challenges in getting the project running.
- Extensive Business Process Unification
- 7 legacy markets had evolved processes & systems independently
- New markets launching without established processes & systems
- Highly distributed workforce
- Speed to Market
- New groups launching without a system in place
- Current group built systems at a breaking point
- Build for Change
- Rapidly evolving business
- External factors require high level of agility with regard to business rules & process
- Small Ongoing Support Team
- Minimal ongoing support team right-sized for the business
Beuckman talked about some of the key decisions Enterprise had to make when planning their project: choosing a BPM platform instead of custom development; Appian instead of another platform; Cloud deployment instead of on-premise; and out-sourced development (using Cognizant) instead of 100% in-house. With all of these decisions made, they were able to go full-steam ahead on Rideshare.
Enterprise uses full dashboards and mobile applications through Appian for customer onboarding through vehicle delivery.
What's next for Rideshare? The Rideshare operating system on Appian will have vehicle management and rental transaction & billing applications. EnterpriseRideshare.com will allow full customer self-service vanpool management.
Worksocial changed the way Rideshare works. Rules-driven automated processes have replaced paper-based manual work. Employees have instant access to context-relevant information and tasks. Thanks to Appian's mobile and social capabilities, the workforce is mobilized and collaboration-enabled.
Alena Callaghan
Web Marketing Manager
