With Office 365, we can attract, recruit, and hire the best of the best, because we can provide them with the tools to help them be successful."
Robert Taylor, Director of IT, Hendrick Automotive Group
Situation
Hendrick Automotive Group, headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, is one of the nation's most successful automotive dealership groups and offers new and pre-owned vehicles, financing, warranties, automobile parts, accessories, service, and body repair. The company was founded in 1976 by Rick Hendrick as a single dealership and now operates 70 dealerships representing 24 nameplates, 90 franchises, and 15 collision centers in 12 states: Alabama, California, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
At Hendrick Automotive Group, dealerships operate autonomously, and 120 management employees—including a small IT team with only 13 people—at the company’s headquarters support its 7,000 teammates. The IT team must provide technology solutions for a group of employees that includes everyone from mechanics to salespeople and accountants, all of whom have very different needs. “The dealerships are mostly concerned with what goes on inside their own four walls, so they do not always see how they can use technology to work together,” says Robert Taylor, Director of IT at Hendrick Automotive Group.
Hendrick Automotive Group deployed its first email solution, Microsoft Exchange 2000, a decade ago, and continued to upgrade to its current deployment of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. “We manage four servers running Exchange Server to support 7,000 teammates, and we struggle with backups, upgrades, moves, and hardware and other routine maintenance,” says Taylor. It also deployed Exchange Unified Messaging for 600 employees, so they could receive and manage voice-mail messages through the Microsoft Outlook messaging and collaboration client. Employees also use the Auto Attendant feature to create custom menus that route callers to the appropriate departments.
To provide instant communication, Hendrick Automotive Group deployed Microsoft Live Communications Server, which it eventually upgraded to Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2. For collaboration and document management, Hendrick Automotive Group deployed Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. “We had to help people understand why they would want to share information,” says Taylor. “We started simply, with things like phone lists and birthday lists, to show why it made sense. Eventually, they started to create their own solutions.”
Some dealerships started using SharePoint Server to create more process-driven and task-based materials, such as workflows for contacting customers, inventory tracking, or checklists for a final sale. They also posted automotive manuals online for easy access. “The truth is that you cannot work on a modern car without a computer. In addition to diagnostic tools, mechanics need quick access to things like manuals for different models,” Taylor continues. “Our mechanics bill by the hour, so every hour they have to spend looking for information is an hour they are not using to fix a car. With SharePoint Server, they could provide one place where mechanics could easily find information.”
Although Hendrick Automotive Group was generally satisfied with its technology solutions, it still faced some challenges. As employees grew more accustomed to using email, they had started to use their mailboxes to store information, which the IT team realized could become a problem in the near future in regard to storage, retention policies, and legal holds and searches. Another issue was that as solutions grew more complex, the IT team spent more time maintaining hardware, software upgrades, patches, and updates than it did providing real solutions to help the business. “We did not feel like we were really contributing to the business by managing all of these centralized services,” says Taylor. “We wanted to focus on the core applications that help the business to grow, and we also wanted to give some quality of life back to the IT team.”
Another challenge that Hendrick Automotive Group faced was how to attract the best talent. It felt that by providing the latest technology, it could recruit and hire better employees to help improve the business in a number of ways. “We have a high turnover in the auto industry in general, so we encourage our dealerships to hire people who have grown up with technical and social networking tools to help them differentiate themselves from the competition,” says Taylor.
All of these challenges led Hendrick Automotive Group to change its perspective on technology and its role in the business. “We had to ask ourselves if we wanted to be in the business of managing email and collaboration, and we realized that we wanted to expand technology through the dealerships rather than have central control,” says Taylor. “We have 90 franchises, and 90 different ways to run a business. We wanted the dealerships to decide how to use technology in the way that works best for them, so we needed a flexible solution.”
Solution
Hendrick Automotive Group considered ways it could decentralize solutions such as email and eventually decided to pilot test hosted services through Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite. The company provided email for two dealerships—about 200 mailboxes—through Microsoft Exchange Online. “For us, BPOS really helped us to prove the business case for moving services to the cloud,” says Taylor. “The experience felt the same to the employees who used it.”
Convinced that cloud-based services could help it meet its present challenges, Hendrick Auto Group decided to transition all of its on-premises Microsoft solutions to Microsoft Office 365, the next generation of hosted services that combines the familiar Office desktop with enhanced cloud-based communication and collaboration services. It joined the Office 365 Rapid Deployment Program to test the latest capabilities.
To prepare for its transition to Office 365, Hendrick Automotive Group deployed Active Directory Federation Services to enable single sign on, so that employees only need to maintain one user name and password. It also deployed Office 365 Directory Sync in order to update the Office 365 user and configuration information automatically any time it makes changes in Active Directory services.
Hendrick Automotive Group will move all employee mailboxes to the latest version of Exchange Online provided with Office 365. With Exchange Online, employees have 25 gigabytes (GB) of space to store email messages. Through Microsoft Outlook Web App, employees have access to capabilities such as Conversation View, which groups together messages from a single conversation. Employees can then quickly and easily identify the most recent messages, view the chain of responses, and see a preview of each response in a conversation upon opening the individual messages.
The company will transition employees from Office Communications Server to Microsoft Lync Online. “When we adopted this technology, we were really surprised at the adoption of presence in general,” says Taylor. “At first, everyone thought instant messaging would be a huge time waster, but it really helps to connect people.” With Lync Online, employees can take advantage of additional capabilities such as Activity Feed and Rich Contact Cards. Employees can use Activity Feed to update their status for co-workers, thereby enhancing the usual presence information that people can already see. The Rich Contact Cards feature displays people’s pictures as well as their managers and direct reports, so employees can more easily find colleagues to help answer questions.
For sharing and managing important documents, Hendrick Automotive Group will transition from SharePoint Server 2007 to Microsoft SharePoint Online. “We are still learning how to use SharePoint Online in our environment, but the dealerships that have embraced it have had a terrific experience,” says Taylor. “With SharePoint Online, we see an opportunity for dealerships to let employees—regardless of their primary jobs—use these tools to create applications to change how we do business.”
From an IT perspective, the move to Office 365 will provide the IT team with more time to focus on applications for the core business. “First, we can move much of our current traffic, which is mostly email and publishing documents in SharePoint Server, off of our network and into the cloud,” says Taylor. “We will have more bandwidth for business applications like our point-of-sale systems.” With administrative tools like the Windows PowerShell command line interface and the web-based management console, the IT team can automate tasks and centrally manage accounts and other settings from any browser on a computer with a broadband connection. The team can also use capabilities like desktop sharing through Lync Online to help dealerships solve problems.
Benefits
By moving to cloud-based services in Office 365, Hendrick Automotive Group can provide the latest technology for its dealerships without increasing the burden on its IT team. In addition, it can attract the best talent to help the business be more successful.
Provides a path to growth
Hendrick Automotive Group knew it had reached its limits for support and maintenance for its on-premises solutions. By moving to Office 365, it can avoid upgrade costs, reduce administration, and provide a flexible solution that can easily expand with the business. “We knew that we could not upgrade our current solutions without installing additional hardware and hiring more people,” says Taylor. “With Office 365, we can provide the latest technology in a way that is more scalable for the business. We essentially get an upgrade to all of our products, but we also get the additional benefit of having everything centrally managed by Microsoft.”
Provides a competitive advantage
Because Hendrick Automotive Group provides the latest technology for employees at its dealerships, it believes it can attract—and keep—employees who are accustomed to using technology to find answers and develop ideas, which will ultimately help it to grow. “With Office 365, we can attract, recruit, and hire the best of the best, because we can provide them with the tools to help them be successful,” explains Taylor.
The company can also enable dealerships to work better together, instead of simply focusing on their own business. “By using solutions like SharePoint Online, our dealerships can create a network to help them share best practices,” he continues. “The dealerships get industry data even before the corporate office, and now they can share that information to help improve sales across the company.”
By transitioning much of the administration for its messaging, communications, and collaboration services to Microsoft, the IT team at Hendrick Automotive Group will have more time to focus on core business applications and developing ideas to help the dealerships run more smoothly. “Because we can hand management and maintenance over to Microsoft, we can transform IT into more of a business enabler,” says Taylor. “We can help our dealerships figure out how to use the technology in a way that is meaningful, instead of simply maintaining solutions and hardware.”
Because it will no longer have to worry about maintaining hardware and providing regular updates, the IT team can also recover time. “We can give some quality of life back to our IT team, because they will not have to spend nights and weekends ensuring everything is updated,” says Taylor.
Hendrick Automotive Group can transition its messaging, communications, and collaboration services to the cloud without sacrificing any capabilities for employees—instead, it can provide the latest technology that will be updated on a regular basis to help employees do their jobs better. The company was impressed with the power of presence in Office Communications Server, but with Office 365 it will have presence and instant messaging capabilities available through all of its solutions. “With Lync Online, they can receive instant feedback,” says Taylor.
It also sees how employees can use the tools to help each other be more effective at work. “We had one dealer create a My Site in SharePoint Online where over a period of months he copied and pasted all the information he could find on General Motors vehicles,” says Taylor. “Now everyone has access to that information through an enterprise search.”
With Office 365, Hendrick Automotive Group can use technology to help employees work better together.
