Carrierindia.com

Executive Summary:
When Carrier Aircon approached us, they had a static site without any interactivity. The brief was to revamp the existing site and provide increased interactivity in itis transactions with the stakeholders like vendors, customers and employees. Several traffic-building, value-added services were also planned to encourage traffic.

Client background:
Jonathan W. Ayers, president of Carrier Corp., loves the Web. But he's no radical. For giant companies like his, he argues, the real power of the Internet lies in doing what you already do faster and cheaper.

Carrier buys more than 50% of its components and services through a Web-based procurement system, and $1 billion in revenue passed through the company's Web-enabled sales channels last year alone. What's even more impressive, Carrier used the Web to cut costs last year by an estimated $100 million.
Benefits for existing & potential Carrier Customers:

Dealer Locator:
www.carrierindia.com holds key to the entire dealer network of Carrier across the length ad breadth of the country. This includes information pertaining to contacting the dealer. Besides the Dealer network, the website has also integrated the database of the comfort shops and comfort points. Comfort Shops being Company owned outlets and Comfort points being dealer owned outlets. The website also has the list of prestigious jobs carried out by Carrier across the country. All the above databases are enabled by a parametric search on the basis of state, city and area.

Registration & Feedback section:
The existing carrier customer has also a provision to register himself and become a member of the Carrier Club. Besides keying in all details with respect to the machines purchased, he can lodge online complaints as well. All registered users are rendered a personalized page, where they can view all the details pertaining to the machines purchased. Provisions to edit the data are also provided.

The queries of the potential customers are also handled well and the system sends an automated response to the potential user.

Online Resume:
The website also addresses the needs of the Human Resources department of Carrier. Any applicant desiring a job at Carrier can post his resume through the application form that has been designed on the site. The system sends an automated response to the applicant and marks a copy of the resume to the HR department.

Email management:
A mailing system is integrated with the dealer locator to enable a user to send enquiry to a specific dealer, a copy of which is automatically routed to the particular regional office of Carrier as well.

Integrated web based content management tool:
www.carrierindia.com website features a complete integrated content management tool using which an authorised person from Carrier can update the product details. The tool also has provision to source the image of the product and the technical specification.

The product details, the guide specifications & the technical specification are available in downloadable format for the existing & potential customers' benefits.

A similar tool is also provided for the News Section. While the latest news appears on the homepage, old news items can be viewed in the archived section. The tool provides an option to send the news items to the archived section, and this is achieved by a single click.

Exclusive Design Features:
Carrierindia.com is a lucid example of a very neatly designed site. It is a three-framed site, which renders fact downloading of the innerpages. The site has judiciously used flash, which adds to the beauty of the site. Some remarkable works are:

The navigation menu:
The navigation menu is dynamic and has a classy finish that enhances the brawny look of the site. The menu has been designed in a very user-friendly manner that the navigator at any point of time can access any section of the site.

Commercial section:
The various press and TV Carrier commercials have been captured very well using flash. They have been well optimized to reduce the download time so that the section can be viewed well even in the absence of high speed Internet connections.

360 pic:
This tool enables a lightweight virtual walkthrough. This has been achieved by taking snap shots of the Carrier showrooms at Chennai. Stitching together professionally taken photographs into one large image and then running a Java applet to simulate a walkthrough achieved this effect. Thus, the 360 pic does not require any plug-ins and at the same time is very light weight.

Technical Summary:
The development team at Innasite has designed a scalable model for the development of carrierindia.com. The complete web solution was built using the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) with SQL as the backend database for the application.

Technical Snapshot:
Operating System: Windows 2000 Middleware Scripting : ASP & VB script Database: SQL Design, Dreamweaver, Flash & JavaScript