Europcar Moves Toward an Integrated European Network

Although Europcar is the largest Europe-based car rental company, it is actually a patchwork of local companies existing under a single corporate identity. Along with the local companies came 55 individual mainframe and minicomputer systems operating on different computers with different operating systems and different application logic. The lack of integration between these systems was a major obstacle to Europcar's ability to compete effectively. In 1992, it signed a $400 million outsourcing contract with the Windsor, England, office of Perot Systems. Perot would build a single integrated information system and operate it at a data center near Europcar's Paris headquarters. The system would be used by 3,000 Europcar employees at 800 offices across Europe. The systems would link the offices to a central database and would support key business processes such as reservations, billing, fleet management, cost control, and corporate finance. Customer delays while clerks manually verified credit cards and processed final bills would be eliminated. In addition, Europcar would be able to manage corporate customers such as IBM from one location.

Perot Systems chose a client-server architecture with a relational database. Elements of the architecture include NCR and Sequent UNIX servers, NCR 3410 and 3450 clients, 3,000 generic PC clients running Windows, and Oracle Version 7 as the DBMS. France's Transpac provided the wide area network.

The project proved more complicated than Perot originally imagined because of data inconsistencies among the many local sites and differences in local culture, currency, business practices, and accounting rules. For example, Austria levies a tax on mileage on cars driven inside the country, but driving outside the country is untaxed. By 1994, the system was supporting Europcar's operations in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Questions:

1. Use the WCA framework to organize your understanding of this vignette and to identify important topics that are not mentioned.

2. What issues (if any) make this case interesting from an international or intercultural viewpoint?

3. Based on the ideas in this chapter and in Chapter 13, what may have been some of the major challenges in doing the analysis for this project?

4. Why is having a client-server architecture important or unimportant in this situation?

Source: Greenbaum, Joshua. "A Bumpy Road for Europcar." Information Week, Feb. 7, 1994, pp. 53-58.

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