CNH Industrial: a dealer portal rebuilt around the people who run dealerships, then rolled out worldwide

At one dealership we interviewed in 2019, the person who handled parts, service and warranty had used the CNH dealer portal for years, and it was one of about 20 manufacturer portals the team logged into. Search rarely found what he was looking for, and he could lose 15 to 20 minutes hunting for a document. Most tasks sent him out to separate applications, order confirmations were scattered across email, and the team printed a lot. They wanted to use the portal on phones and tablets in the field, and a dashboard with the things they use every day.

Behind that desk sat a harder problem. The portal was built around one user ID per store, so a person working for a dealer group could need nine IDs for nine dealerships across four brands, while dealers were consolidating into fewer, bigger groups. The portal had to serve every CNH brand, country and language, and every role in a dealership, from sales to parts to service.

For CNH the portal is the sales channel to its dealers. If it is hard to use, dealers who also carry other manufacturers’ lines feel it first.

Keeping the portal running, and learning from it

From 2013 we supported the existing portal day to day: incidents, controlled releases, and the daily dealer data loads and user loads that keep a multi-brand, multi-region portal accurate. In 2013–2014 we set its strategy and roadmap with workshops, dealer visits and surveys of dealers and content authors, and a vision prototype of one portal for every brand, personalized by brand and role. We also built the content and sign-on services behind Mobile Dealer Connect, CNH’s app for dealers.

Research with dealers before design

The redesign began in March 2019 with on-site sessions at CNH with the owners of each business process, on dealer reporting, the dealer experience, information architecture, system data and content, followed by interviews with dealers in April.

A design system for every brand

We created a design system for the new portal: a catalog of interface components tied directly to the front-end code, so every brand gets a consistent, responsive and accessible interface and new pages are assembled from parts that already work. On it we designed the information architecture and the experience for a global portal, with personalized views for each brand.

Built on the platform CNH already ran

We built the portal on IBM (now HCL) Digital Experience with its content framework, templates, taxonomy and personalization rules, and the data integration behind it. It brings together parts ordering, marketing and sales materials, training, and each dealer’s order and accounting information, and we documented it and trained CNH’s content authors.

Region by region, until every dealer had moved

After North America, Australia went first, together with a redesigned dealer finance application; South America followed, with Spanish and Portuguese as main languages and a language setup later regions reused; then Europe, with dealer administration adapted to European rules and its dealer content migrated; then Asia-Pacific and the remaining markets. We migrated dealer and staff records market by market and supported each launch.

The redesigned portal launched in North America in 2020. By September 2022 every region had launched and every dealer had moved to it, and we then helped CNH shut the old portal down. As of 2023, by CNH’s own figures, the portal served 12,000+ dealerships in 168 countries, in 29 languages, across 11 brands.

Our part, across nine years: running the dealer portal from 2013 to 2022, its strategy and roadmap, and the research, design, build and global rollout of its replacement, with CNH’s teams.