Toyota Motor Corporation was founded in 1937 and is the world’s third-largest automobile manufacturer, with 246,000 employees worldwide. It manufactured over 6 million vehicles in 2002 under the Toyota and Lexus brands, and marketed them in over 160 countries.

The first Toyota imported into Europe was via Denmark in 1963. Toyota has continued to grow in Europe’s sophisticated and complex market, and in January 2003, the company sold its twelve millionth car. Toyota is the leading Japanese car brand in Europe.

Toyota is number one for customer satisfaction in the majority of European countries and has built an excellent reputation across Europe for reliability and customer service. This enviable reputation, along with the support of a network of more than 25 national marketing and sales companies and 3,500 sales outlets, are important factors in supporting Toyota’s European sales growth in the coming years.

The first Toyota vehicles to be made in Europe were produced under license in Portugal in 1971. In 1992, Toyota began fully-fledged production of cars and engines in Britain. A new facility in France began production of the Yaris in 2001, and in April 2002, Toyota started assembling gasoline engines at the manufacturing plant in France and building transmissions at a new plant in Poland. Thanks to a joint venture between PSA Peugeot-Citroën and Toyota Motor Corporation, a new vehicle manufacturing plant will become operational in 2005 in the Czech Republic. All core Toyota models (Yaris, Corolla, Avensis) will be built in Europe by 2004, at which point Toyota will also be in a position to produce 500,000 vehicles, 830,000 engines and 550,000 transmissions annually in Europe.

To meet the challenges of today and the future, Toyota has put in place a truly multinational skilled workforce. A new holding company, Toyota Motor Europe (TME), was established on July 1, 2002 to ensure a better coordination between marketing, sales, research & development and manufacturing activities in Europe. Toyota Motor Marketing Europe (TMME) oversees marketing and sales activities in more than 25 countries. Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing Europe (TMEM) has been established to support and co-ordinate the company’s European manufacturing operations and research and development in Europe. Toyota also has a European Design and Development centre (ED2) located in the south of France. Toyota employs over 56,000 people in Europe.

The Challenge
In 1998, TMME’s information technology department launched a pilot project for a data warehouse to facilitate reporting for the formerly called “Conversion and Accessories Planning” division, (vehicle transformation, accessory installation, etc.). This pilot project was aimed at improving customer services through data analysis. Beyond this however, TMME wanted to familiarize itself with the building of a data warehouse. “Our final objective was to develop a corporate data warehouse that would integrate all corporate data and support all major strategic decisions,” explained Siegfried Van Wayenberg, Business Application Project Manager for TMME.

Creating the corporate data warehouse was further stimulated and facilitated by another large project: the development of a new, integrated spare parts management application under DB2. Management decided that all reporting required for the new spare parts application would be performed via the data warehouse.

To build the data warehouse, the IT department responsible for this project, managed by Mr. Van Wayenberg, called on consultants from Flux Consultancy who proposed an extensible approach for building the data warehouse. Flux Consultancy suggested that TMME use an ETL tool that would support data warehouse architecture principles heavily focused on generic services and the reuse of software components. The development of the data warehouse and the new spare parts application were performed simultaneously.

Toward the end of 1998, TMME began looking for an ETL tool that was able to meet a certain number of fundamental technical constraints. “In addition to providing adequate support for extensibility, the ETL tool had to run in a mainframe environment (IBM OS/390) and under the control of the existing scheduler,” explained Mr. Van Wayenberg, “which excluded any type of tool based on an ETL engine approach.”

A shortlist of three products emerged, including the ETI Solution® products from ETI.  A “proof of technology” test was set up at TMME. “We had prepared a scenario for installing and using the tool and we asked three short-listed ETL software providers to execute this scenario in a three/four days period,” said Mr. Van Wayenberg.

The Solution
TMME selected ETI Solution for several reasons. “Firstly, because it was the tool which integrated most easily into our legacy architecture while respecting internal standards,” said Mr. Van Wayenberg. “The fact that ETI uses adaptable templates for generating COBOL programs - the language we use the most - was another important factor.”

To install and customize ETI Solution to TMME standards (an operation which only required 5 days), a team was set up consisting of an ETI system engineer and an Integration Architect, an engineer from the TMME IT department who attended ten days of training. The development of the data warehouse architecture, which required about four months, was then incorporated into this tool, taking its development paradigm into account. “By using this method, we obtained an ETL conversion development environment fully integrated with the company’s architecture standards,” noted Mr. Van Wayenberg.

The actual development of conversions for feeding the data warehouse began in January 2000. Since its implementation, ETI Solution has been used for generating about 2,000 ETL programs resulting from approximately 800 ETI conversions.

The Results
After having dealt with initial learning curve problems, all the ETI™-related activities were completed successfully, and Mr. Van Wayenberg underlined the tool’s excellent adaptability to Toyota’s IT environment and the productivity gains related to ETL software maintenance: “For example, we migrated the initial version of the data warehouse architecture to a new version, including significant new functionality impacting each and every conversion. This task took us no more than four months, from March to June 2002, causing only limited deployment problems when you consider that 2,000 programs had to be generated, tested and deployed!”

Thanks to ETI Solution, ETI developers at TMME can focus on their mapping requirements instead of writing programs: the tool handles everything else. “The fact that the tool generates COBOL programs from customized templates implies that our ETI developers in almost all cases do not have to deal with the COBOL aspects related to the data warehouse architecture,” added Mr. Van Wayenberg.