Toyota Dealership Management System

Officially recommended by Toyota Motor
Highly adaptive to customer business processes

Expertise

Business Process Automation

Verticals

Manufacturing

Retail

Iflexion created an effective instrument to automate and manage the network of Toyota and Lexus car dealerships.

Duration

Months

Efforts

Person-months

Context
Solution
Development Process
Technologies
Customer Benefits
Results
Customer Voice

Context

Business Car Ltd. (a part of Toyota Group) is the largest dealership in Russia selling Toyota and Lexus cars, with 1,500 employees and an annual revenue of $1.1 billion. The company also sells and maintains Toyota industrial machinery, Yamaha motorcycles, accessories and equipment for body repair, and provides car leasing and rent services.

For several years Business Car Ltd. used the TOCIS ERP system to automate the work of its commercial departments, which was developed and supported in-house. However, with time a number of the system’s drawbacks were revealed, such as the high cost of support and implementation in new dealership centers, poor adaptation to changing business processes, high licensing fees for the Oracle tools used in the system, and others.

Besides technical changes, Business Car Ltd. also planned to reengineer their business processes according to Toyota’s requirements. In doing so, they also hoped to optimize work with employees, vendors and customers, and to increase revenues.

In view of this, the company’s top management decided to develop a second version of the ERP system (TOCIS II), which would help in achieving the following goals:

Optimize the company’s business processes
Reduce costs on the creation, change, and updating of documentation related to business processes
Reduce time, effort, and money spent on change requests and the adjustment of the system to new business processes
Reduce the TCO of the ERP system
Enable all regional branches to work in one information environment
Support the Toyota Service Marketing (TSM) methodology

Solution

Iflexion created an effective instrument to automate and manage this network of Toyota and Lexus car dealerships.

The TOCIS II system automates the key business processes of Business Car Ltd.

The Automobile Sales Center Module is used for retail and wholesale of cars, and customer relationship management
The Spares Module is used for retail and wholesale of spare parts and accessories, and warehouse control management
The After Service Module is used to automate the after sales and repair processes.

The TOCIS II system is built with the use of open source solutions, which eliminates any license payments and leads to the reduction of the total cost of ownership.

The solution is highly adaptive to customer business processes thanks to Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), which allows each dealership of the holding to have its own version of business processes.

The system is based on web technologies, which ensure a high level of scalability — new dealerships are added through mere system customization.

The multi-level architecture guarantees a low cost for changes in the system. It includes presentation, business logic and database layers.

Development Process

To achieve the customer’s objectives, Iflexion business analysts investigated and described the business processes of Business Car Ltd. using the most modern methodologies and tools of business process modeling available at the time:

• Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN)

• Unified Modeling Language (UML)

• Corel iGrafx, Sparx Enterprise Architect

One of the challenges that Iflexion specialists encountered was the absence of a comprehensive description of business processes and the ERP system of the company. Many processes were not formalized, while others were conducted in an outdated way. Years of business experience were not considered, and the recommendations of Toyota Motor Corporation were not utilized.

Iflexion business analysts had a series of meetings and workshops with the managers and domain experts of Business Car Ltd. to describe, regulate, and optimize the company’s business processes. Specialists of consulting companies were engaged to help reengineer the most problem areas.

As a result, Business Car Ltd. received a comprehensive description of optimized business processes, which included a large number of models (charts) and associated documentation.

More than 200 business processes were described, including over 4,000 business activities subject to automation. The description:

Regulates the work of the company’s employees
Is a business process change management tool
Serves as the basis for requirements for the new TOCIS II ERP system

Technologies

TOCIS II is based on the JavaEE platform with the use of a great number of Java technologies, such as JPA, EJB, JAX-WS, BPEL, JSF (RichFaces & Ajax4JSF), etc.

The technical realization is a client-server application that includes a thin web client and server-side, and is built as a traditional multi-tier model. The architecture includes the database, business logic and presentation layers. The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) was used as a means of creating business processes, which greatly increased the changeability of the system business logic.

The environment in which TOCIS II is deployed includes the following:

• Glassfish as the application server for JavaEE

• PostgreSQL as the database server

• Additional components OpenESB and BPEL SE to enable business processes

The technology choice was made based on the customer’s requirements (who wanted to reduce the TCO) and on test results (carried out during prototyping)

To provide high performance and stability of the system, TOCIS II can be installed as a cluster (i.e. horizontally scaled). Clustering is done on two levels: the application server level (Glassfish), and the database level (the multi-master replication variant). During clustering of the application server, the user session is replicated, which gives the system much more stability.

To build the most effective requirements management process, a special tool (Borland CaliberRM) was used, which enabled us to significantly decrease the time and effort spent. Optimization was achieved thanks to the systematic registration of requirements, interdependencies control, and the use of a test model and corresponding software.