CIO Magazine
Award Recognizes Enterprise Rent-A-Car for Best Use of Technology
in Customer Service
CIO Magazine recognized Enterprise-Rent-A-Car, the largest rental
car company in North America, as one of 100 companies achieving
excellence in customer service through innovative uses of technology.
This is the second consecutive year that Enterprise has been
a CIO-100 Award recipient. Last year, the award identified Enterprise
as one of the “100 companies most likely to succeed in the next
millennium.”
The recognition from CIO Magazine underscores the quality of
career opportunities for technology professionals that are available
at St. Louis-based Enterprise. Since last year, Enterprise has
increased its information technology (IT) group from 750 to
1,000 technology professionals. Plans are to continue to expand
this group by 18 to 25 percent per year over the next several
years in order to keep pace with the company’s rapid growth
in new and expanded markets in the United States and internationally.
“One of the benefits of working in our IT area is the diversity
of technology,” says Craig Kennedy, vice president of information
systems at Enterprise. “Because of today’s demands on IT, we’ve
become an ‘everything’ shop in addition to being an NT and AS/400
shop. This means having many options for business solutions
and offering a lot of challenges for the people who work for
us.”
The IT area is highly involved in applications and technologies
that support the worldwide tracking of nearly 500,000 rental
cars, linking more than 4,000 locations, and connecting electronically
with business-to-business partners. “Being customer-focused
is the foundation upon which our entire company philosophy is
based, from offering “pick you up” to using technology to improve
customer service,” Kennedy says.
With nearly $5 billion in fiscal sales, Enterprise continues
to set standards in the industry. A study by J.D. Powers and
Associates gave Enterprise the highest ranking in customer satisfaction
for rental car companies operating at or near airports; Fortune
named Enterprise one of the “100 Best Companies to Work For”
in 1999; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
named Enterprise as a “Five-Star Standard” growth company along
with Microsoft and Dell.
National publication touts St. Louis as one of “tomorrow’s
vital economic centers”
In an article
entitled, Meet Me in St. Louis—Middle America Poised for Internet-based
Real Estate Boom, in the August 21 issue of Investment Dealers’
Digest, St. Louis is named as one of the cities that offers
easy connectivity to major fiber optic network routes running
throughout the country, thus holding “great development promise.”
This is the conclusion drawn from the recently released Lehman
Brothers real estate research report. “We’ll see growth popping
up in less obvious places than people now expect,” says the
report’s author David Shulman. These cities’ access to the Internet’s
backbone, defined loosely as the express lanes of the telecommunications
network, could make them on ramps of the Internet’s interstate
highway system.”
The article also stresses St. Louis’ ability to offer affordable
office space. According to the report, some distinguishing characteristics
to look for are: “A good telecom infrastructure that has the
potential to house ‘facilities such as telco hotels, server
farms and data hosting centers, which previously did not exist.’”
According to the article, typical characteristics of telecom
havens include proximity to the fiber optic backbone via multiple
carriers, access to multiple power grids, and space for utility
and fiber optic power lines, among other criteria.
