Case study on Danford Automotive Company

Danford Automotive Company (DAC) is one of the UK’s largest importers, distributers
and retailers of motor vehicles and was the largest General Motors dealer in Europe in
the year 2005 and 2006 consecutively. Today DAC maintains a network of 7 National
branches over 25 authorised dealerships, with more than 600 employees and an annual
turnover of approximate £500 million pounds.

The management of DAC believes that IT builds the backbone of any great company.
DAC has built a strong in-house application development team that understands the
business in general and automotive specifically. In 2005, during efforts to align IT with
business strategies and plans, the team realised that their existing business applications
were heading towards the end of their life cycles and could hardly support the future
plans of the company in an efficient, cost effective and timely manner. They recognise
the need for a new generation of software to play a role in shaping the company’s future
in the fast changing and dynamic world of globalisation and the information era. The IT
steering committee initiated an ERP evaluation project. The results of the study showed
that the ERP system from SAP( an industry leader in business management software)
was the right technology to support their current and future business plans.

The implementation project started mid 2006 with the objective of laying a new
technology foundation by integrating the core modules of the SAP –Business suite with
the Industry solution for Automotive suppliers (IS Automotive). The benefits of this new
technology would be gradually perceived by the consecutive implementations of further
components and the functions and would be realised when business processes and
strategic plans were optimised and supported.

As with any new system, there were accompanying changes: Changes in duties and
responsibilities, authorisation, workflows and processes and also changes in the
presentation of data and information. Due to the history, size and structure of the
company and the nature of its business, the team had to maintain the reporting
standards and migrate a lot of data from the old system to meet the needs of the
business units.

In one 72 hour exercise in the beginning of the January 2008, the team extracted the
data from the legacy systems, imported in to SAP, closed the doors to the company’s
legacy system, opened the gates to SAP and went live. This required good planning, co-
ordination, discipline, punctuality and the efforts of almost everyone in the company.
Success did not come immediately, but within a period of one year, the IT manager was
on record as saying “ The introduction of ERP in our organisation was the beginning
of a new era for our company and an opportunity to enrich the experience of every
individual using it”.