Business overview: 112% okay
Toyota Denmark uses well-known philosophies and techniques from the company’s country of origin to manage its systems. But within the large group, the Danish branch is a pioneer when it comes to SOA.
To Toyota Denmark’s IT manager Niels Sværke, SOA is primarily about strengthening the business processes via an increased use of IT – it’s only secondarily about the technology itself.
That’s why he was completely open-minded when he initiated Toyota Denmark’s change project early last year by contacting a series of enterprise architecture suppliers.
Before that, a growing need to make IT a strategic and supportive part of the business processes led Toyota Denmark to consider in the beginning of 2006 how this could best be realized.
In the area of IT, the Danish branch of the Toyota group is to a certain extent bound by the guidelines fixed by the European head office in Brussels. However, the Danes evidently have some say in the choice of optimal IT solutions that support both Toyota’s own employees and the networks of dealers and repair shops – a total of 2,000 users.
IT must support the business processes
The people at Toyota’s IT department were well aware that there were many different options and they did look at various types of enterprise architecture from Lotus, IBM, and Bea.
"We’ve used an AS400 platform for 25 years and it’s currently being phased out. It turned out, however, that AS400 runs a great number of applications, so it’s a bit tricky. We wanted an extensive business overview and at the same time we needed to integrate a series of new processes coming from our head office in Brussels. And, needless to say, we had some business goals that we had to reach. If we had carried on with the point-to-point development that we had been practising for some years we would have ended up in a situation where we didn’t have the complete overview and where we would have been very dependent on a few key persons with specialist knowledge," says IT manager Niels Sværke, Toyota Denmark.
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