Toyota is a big name in Automobile Industry. Those who are involved in study and practice of business management might have heard about the Toyota Way. Toyota Way consists of best management principles. One of the well known principles is called kaizen or continuous improvement. Another lesser known principle of Toyota way goes like this: Use only reliable, thoroughly tested technology that serves your people and processes. Let us have a look at a recently implemented BI project at Toyota Motors. We shall get some valuable insights out of this exercise.
Product Quality Analytics
One could remember the product/ car recalls because of quality issues. This becomes a huge crisis inside the company. To tackle this, Toyota’s Technical Information Group built a Product Quality Analytics system. This is a new system created to tackle the issue of massive product recalls by doing a complete business intelligence program.
- Insight: This is a need driven BI System involving Business, IT Collaboration.
Importantly, the system allows its quality engineers to filter, visualize and explore multiple years’ worth of quality data for patterns that they wouldn’t even have known to look for previously. The system was developed in partnership with Toyota’s IT organization at a time when business groups in many companies are increasingly taking the lead on such efforts. Its role is more about providing and governing the data that feeds BI systems, rather than building out the BI system
- Insight: BI efforts should be driven by internal resources.
The system provides a common view of six years’ worth of product and quality data from multiple internal systems across the company. The system supports both structured and unstructured data, a search-engine-like interface, and filters that allow users to view product quality data in a manner that was not previously possible. It allows Toyota’s quality engineers to search through, drill down, mash up and analyze data from sources as disparate as its vehicle configuration system, customer call centres, warranty claims system, customer mediation group and service-centers.
- Insight: It is massively data driven.
About half of the time and budget was spent on improving the data quality. The data being used by the BI system was as relevant and consistent.
- Insight: Data quality is of prime importance in BI
An innovative BI software tool was used in the project. This is Endeca’s Latitude which offers the benefit of power of business intelligence combined with simplicity of search; the power to bring together diverse data with ease, high speed resulting in high agility.
- Insight: Select and use the right software tool(s).
The above case study is one of the good examples to prove that the BI systems planned and implemented well could solve enterprise facing pressing problems.