Toyota NZ is a subsidiary of Toyota Motor Corporation, Japan and sells new Toyota and Lexus vehicles as well as used vehicles, parts and service.
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- Toyota NZ is a subsidiary of Toyota Motor Corporation, Japan and sells new Toyota and Lexus vehicles as well as used vehicles, parts and service.
Locations
Key operation locations are at the National Customer Centre in Palmerston North, Vehicle Operations in Thames and a Port of Entry facility and Corporate Sales Office in Auckland.
Website: toyota.co.nz
“Stellar are clearly best in breed…”
Mark Young,
Corporate GM for Toyota NZ
The challenge
Selling 25% of all cars and light trucks in New Zealand, Toyota has dominated the market for decades. But even market leaders need to continue improving, and Toyota realised that its future success depended on developing a deeper understanding of its customers and markets.
When they looked “under the bonnet” of their legacy BI systems, however, Toyota found that its people were still manually building and maintaining spreadsheets. Information wasn’t always accurate or up to date, it was often hard to audit, and it was kept in “silos” which obscured the big picture. Stellar was asked to bring a strategic enterprise focus to BI, to help Toyota overcome a series of poorly executed BI initiatives, and to ensure that the company had:
Access to accurate data in real time across multiple sections of the business at separate locations.
Insight into ‘big picture’ trends for planning, plus specific data sets by region, dealership or individual customers
The solution
Stellar used their Microsoft BI experience and support from Microsoft’s local solution specialists to demonstrate how an enterprise BI solution could use Toyota’s existing Microsoft platform and retain familiar tools such as Excel. Then, Stellar’s BI experts analysed Toyota’s core reporting processes, designed and implemented the technical platform, established development standards and processes, and built the solution components.
The system extracts data from five core operational systems (including JDE ERP and Simplicity CRM) and external data feeds (e.g. NZTA vehicle registration files) using a structured SSIS ETL framework that draws on the Microsoft Project REAL best-practice architecture.
By using the Microsoft BI platform, Stellar was able to design SharePoint dashboards that resemble Excel charts and tables. This has permitted incremental, low impact release cycles to transition users onto the enterprise BI platform with minimal training and disruption. Now, everyone from the CEO to warehouse stock pickers gets daily updates, providing a level of business insight previously unimaginable.
The benefits
- Enhanced customer experience.
- Disseminating and understanding information.
- Self-service reporting.
- Building competitive advantage.
- Accountability through “visibility”.
- Reducing manual manipulation of information.
- Saving time and money.