Honda

	Working with Harvey Nash in Vietnam has allowed Honda to reduce costs whilst providing greater flexibility in resourcing projects. Effective communication is the key with the offshore developments and Harvey Nash’s UK team has helped tremendously in this area.
	Andy Smith, Honda UK

Sector

Automotive

Skills / Platforms

Wide range of technologies, packages and products including: DB2, MS SQL, XML, CSS, Javascript, JSP, JavaBeans (not EJB), IBM WebSphere,

Size

Common Tracking System 290 days in 4 months Honda Garden Store 176 days in 3 months Learning Management System 1,870 over 8 months Honda Motorcycle Website 221 over 4 months Sales Activity Reports 67days over 6 weeks Used Cars Sales Locator 224 days over 4 months

Background

Honda is a globally recognised brand in a wide range of sectors from automotive to homeware. Harvey Nash have been working with Honda UK at Swindon for some years and have successfully completed a number of key projects for them

Requirement

Honda had identified a need for additional developer resources to support a number of identified and future projects. Harvey Nash was selected for its proven expertise and demonstrable capacity to develop applications rapidly and cost-effectively. Harvey Nash has now completed a number of projects, described below, and as part of a long term relationship is in constant dialogue with Honda to assess projects and allocate offshore development resources where required

Solution

Common Tracking System

Design and build of a web application receiving requests from clients and tracking the requests until they are resolved. The application also consolidates solutions to the requests into a knowledge base to enable the helpdesk to answer subsequent requests more quickly. The application is designed to interact with other existing applications of Honda UK, which provide information about clients, staff and learning courses. It is also designed to support multi-lingual interfaces.

Honda Garden Store

This project involved re-writing the existing Honda UK Garden Stores web site to:

• Reflect the new Honda UK corporate identity
• Add more functionality to provide a more diverse range of information so that it will become a ‘one stop shop’ for all information relating to Honda Lawn and Garden products
• Replace existing Microsoft ASP/Access technology with Java/IBM WebSphere/DB2
• Internationalisation support for multi-languages and multi-countries
• Integrate with the current Honda development environment and Secure Shop to provide for e-commerce functionality

Learning Management System

Honda uses this Web application to organize, manage and report on its training courses with related information such as trainers, trainees, subjects, classrooms, materials and grades. Originally developed for Honda UK, the system has been rolled out in Germany and France. It was subsequently adopted by Honda Japan and is now being rolled out world-wide under an ongoing maintenance agreement.

Honda Motorcycle Web Site

This project involved re-writing the existing Honda UK Motorcycles web site to:

• Reflect the new Honda UK corporate identity
• Add more functionality to provide a more diverse range of information so that it will become a ‘one stop shop’ for all information relating to Honda Motorcycles
• Replace existing Microsoft ASP/Access technology with Java/IBM WebSphere/DB2
• Internationalisation support for multi-languages and multi-countries
• Integrate with the current Honda development environment

Sales Activity Reports

Development of a Web application to provide a range of reports about sales activities, such as showroom control, customer follow-up and daily operations. The reports are presented in Web and MS Excel format.

Used Cars Sales Locator

Honda required Harvey Nash to build this web tool to allow its dealers and users to locate and resell used cars. It has multi-lingual interfaces and currently supports English and German.

Benefits

Honda continue to reap the benefits of projects being supported from offshore with a very professional service and product delivered in a rapid, cost-effective manner.