Industrial and Manufacturing

Bridgestone South Africa (Pty) Ltd

Bridgestone South Africa has proved to be one of our most loyal and longstanding clients. Since our inception in 2000 Online Innovations have been responsible for the web presence and extranets of Bridgestone South Africa and the Bridgestone South Africa Family, namely Supa Quick, Speedy, Autoquip and MaxT Solutions (previous known as Maxiprest Tyres).

In 2011, in conjunction with the Bridgestone’s 75^th anniversary, Bridgestone introduced their new brand symbol and corporate philosophy. The Bridgestone Corporation used this opportunity to align all their websites worldwide to conform to a common corporate id and w3c accessibility standards. Online Innovations also used this opportunity to upgrade many of the website’s functions, elements and components with the latest web technologies and features.

The new Bridgestone South Africa website was published in February 2011 and was one of the first world-wide Bridgestone websites to be rolled out successfully brandishing the new look and feel.

Conforming to the specific accessibility and operations guideline’s stipulated by the CID was necessary and the redevelopment proved to be standard except for the following challenges.

Search engine optimisation or SEO

Careful consideration had to be taken of the fact that the website was now being redeveloped in PHP, and that all the existing listings on the search engines previously linked to .ASP pages. The search engines had indexed the Bridgestone website extensively and the site featured well not only locally but internationally. Any oversight here would result in all those listings being lost as a change in the development language would mean a page extension change resulting in errors.

Not only did the countermeasures that we took to overcome this ensure that none of the existing listings were removed on the search engines but the conformation to the w3c standards ensured that the search engine rankings improved considerably.

Business to business

Limiting and even abolishing a large corporate’s monthly statement run and replacing it with an online facility can result in massive financial benefits. The savings on stationery, faxing and postage can total astronomical values per annum. Bridgestone’s IT department’s foresight and willingness to adopt the internet made this possible.

Online Innovations were responsible for the development of a business-to-business, restricted access site whereby the Bridgestone Family and customers can login and view, print and download their statements, remittances and rebates.

Web services and extranets

Supa Quick, Speedy, Autoquip and MaxT Solutions all form part of the Bridgestone Family in South Africa and Online Innovations are responsible for the all web services that provide the Bridgestone Family with common library-, news-, product- and dealer information- feeds that are administered centrally by Bridgestone SA.