Customer story · Dealer network

300 to 450 outlets per country, five businesses, franchisees. And one tool for everyone.

Feedback from BMW: simplifying exchanges between headquarters and dealerships

At BMW in France, headquarters supports each dealership on a wide range of topics, with many people involved on both sides. Perfony has been used there since late 2018 to share information and follow up actions, dealership by dealership. The same tool was then adopted in other European countries of the group.

Based on the testimony of Blandine Datar, management advisor, BMW Motorrad France, published in October 2020

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One folder, everyone involved. Each dealership has its own folder in Perfony, with the relevant people from headquarters and the network attached to it. Discussions happen as comments on the actions.

The problem

The BMW Group builds premium cars and motorcycles under the BMW, Mini, Rolls-Royce and BMW Motorrad brands. In each country, headquarters has to coordinate and manage a network of 300 to 450 outlets, across five different businesses, with franchisees who remain independent entrepreneurs. Getting everyone to move in the same direction is far from simple.

Blandine Datar is a management advisor at BMW Motorrad France. Her role is to help dealers in their daily work. The scope is very broad: inventory management, profitability, customer committees, real estate projects, compliance with brand standards in the dealership. Advisors work in pairs, and each topic involves other people: the dealership itself, but also, at headquarters, district managers, after-sales representatives or the marketing department.

The testimony sums up the challenge in three points:

• managing a wide variety of actions, of very different kinds;
• interacting with a very large number of people, at headquarters and in the network;
• ensuring relevant, consistent and reliable information, without leaving anyone out.

In such a network, the risk is not a lack of information. It is information that reaches only some of the people concerned, or gets lost in already crowded mailboxes.

The choice

Perfony was set up at the end of 2018 in the BMW, BMW Motorrad and Mini brand networks, notably with district managers, to help manage business between headquarters and dealerships. The criterion that stands out in the testimony is simplicity: a tool that everyone, at headquarters and in the dealership, can pick up, and that gives everyone the same level of information.

The solution

The organisation rests on a few simple principles, described by Blandine Datar.

1. One folder per dealershipEach dealership has its own folder, with all the people involved attached to it, at headquarters and in the network. Everyone knows where to find what concerns them, and no one is left out.
2. Comments rather than emailsEveryone follows up on the topics entrusted to them by commenting on the action, without overloading mailboxes. The history stays attached to the action.
3. Notifications as alertsEmail notifications remain active for those who want them: they signal that something is happening, without carrying the discussion itself.
4. Themes to sort actionsAt the start, the folder structure was too complicated. With the Perfony project manager, it was simplified by sorting actions by theme, without starting over.

This is the logic of shared action plans: one action, one owner, one due date, and a discussion that stays with the action instead of being scattered across inboxes.

The impact

What Blandine Datar takes away from Perfony, in her own words:

• "It is a very powerful tool, which allows harmonisation to structure the folders."
• "Perfony ensures good circulation of information, without forgetting anyone, while reducing the volume of emails."
• "I found it interesting how easy it was to reorganise Perfony. It was really fast."
• "I kept the email notifications because I like the alert side of it."

These benefits come less from a specific feature than from a shared rule: everything about a dealership is in one place, visible to the same people. This is what makes it possible to avoid scattered action plans across a network.

The proof

Perfony's strength here comes down to one principle: one tool for everyone. Headquarters, district managers, advisors and every outlet in the network, whatever its business, work in the same space, with the same rules. That is what makes a network of several hundred outlets manageable.

After France, Perfony was adopted in other European countries of the group: the United Kingdom, the Nordic countries, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium and Luxembourg, Portugal. The same need, the same answer.

The advice

For Blandine Datar, the key to success comes down to one thing: naming conventions. Before rolling Perfony out to dealers, everyone has to speak the same language.

She also highlights the role of support: it was the vigilance of the Perfony project manager that corrected, early on, a folder structure that had got off to a bad start. A mistake at the beginning is not serious if the tool is easy to reorganise.