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Leading the Australian automotive race
Located outside Melbourne, Toyota Australia (www.toyota.com.au)-a subsidiary of the Toyota Motor Company-manufactures and distributes automobiles, engines and components to supply 255 domestic Australian dealers, as well as 33 export markets in the Asia-Pacific region. With manufacturing facilities producing 100,000 new vehicles per year, the company is a consistent leader in the Australian automotive market-ahead of several large global competitors. "Australia is Toyota's longest-established offshore manufacturing base and one of its most successful markets," says James Scott, Manager of Information Technology (IT) Infrastructure for Toyota Australia. "We have led our market for six of the ten years between 1990 and 2000."
Engineering a platform for the future
Toyota Australia's corporate IT systems (predominately SAP) had grown significantly over a four-year period and its legacy hardware was no longer capable of serving its current and future needs. "We ended up with a fragmented infrastructure and increasing costs," explains Scott. "We were managing eight servers, six separate tape drives and many hard disk arrays-and we had to keep buying new hardware as we ran out of space." To remain a leader in the market, Toyota Australia decided to implement a solution that could provide easier scalability, improved disaster recovery capabilities and a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). "By consolidating our systems onto a single platform with cost-effective scalability and improved responsiveness, we felt that we could achieve a far better growth position," Scott says. And because the company had several upcoming business initiatives-potentially requiring significant infrastructure expansion- the ability to expand was essential.
A turnkey solution from IBM
IBM helped the automotive company consolidate its disparate systems onto two powerful IBM eServer pSeries 690 machines running on IBM AIX® and connected to an IBM FAStT500 Storage Server. "IBM Global Services Australia brought in a team of specialists to migrate our legacy systems-including our entire SAP implementation-to our new IBM platform," explains Scott. "From our perspective, it was virtually a turnkey solution that has provided us with full redundancy and 50-percent faster disaster recovery."
Currently, Toyota Australia runs its production system on one p690, and its development and disaster recovery operations on a second, from a remote data center facility. Leveraging the logical partitioning (LPAR) of IBM eServer technology, Toyota Australia has constructed several fully redundant partitions between its two pSeries systems, thus enabling a level of security and cost-effective scalability unavailable on its previous platform.
Driving a lower total cost of ownership
Toyota Australia's new IBM solution is already driving cost and time savings, according to Scott. "Since the migration, we have lowered our TCO and estimate that over the next four years our IBM eServer platform can help us save up to AU$7 million in hardware and facilities management costs," he says. "We have also measured faster run times for many important jobs." Scott reports that these time savings included cutting down to three minutes a supply chain job that previously required two hours, and reducing the time to complete a material costing job that typically lasted ten hours down to only two hours.
Eyes on the road ahead: scalability on demand
In addition to helping reduce TCO and shortening job run times, Toyota Australia is taking advantage of the self-optimizing and self-configuring capabilities of the IBM eServer system-key features of an on demand operating environment. "The on demand scalability of our IBM pSeries systems enables us to fast-track our critical initiatives," reports Scott. "We can respond dynamically to new demands by implementing additional LPARs with minimal additional investment, allowing us to speed up time-to-market and strengthen our market leadership position."
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This customer story is based on information provided by Toyota Australia and illustrates how one organization uses IBM products. Many factors may have contributed to the results and benefits described; IBM does not guarantee comparable results elsewhere.
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