Data Migrator Steers Toyota in the Right Direction

Snapshot

Organization Toyota Belgium

Profile Automobile parts distribution and post-sales service support

The Strategy Automobile parts distribution and post-sales service support

Headquarters Braine-L'alleud, Belgium

The Challenge Migrate files from legacy applications to R/3™ within a limited time frame

Results The amount of time and resources needed to implement the new application was slashed in half.

Information Builders Solution SNAPpack Data Migrator (Data Migrator for SAP)

Toyota Belgium, a subsidiary of the financial holding company Inchcape, is responsible for marketing, distribution, and after-sales service of Toyota and Lexus vehicles in Belgium and Luxembourg. The company serves a critical support function for more than 200 dealers.

Highly automated and a disciple of Japanese lean logistics principles, Toyota Belgium uses a spare-parts computer application that is truly mission-critical. Every day, the system contributes several million Belgian francs to the company's revenue stream and serves as a key tool for providing superior customer service. The company cannot afford for it to fail.

Hitting a Roadblock

Toyota had been running its spare-parts mainframe application with the SAP™ R/2 since 1988. However, release 4.4 of R/2 – along with a financial application that had been utilized since 1980 – was set to become obsolete in 1999. Toyota turned to its strategic partner, Cap Gemini Belgium, for advice on how to ensure continuity with these applications.

With 35,000 consultants worldwide, Cap Gemini is one of the largest management consulting and systems integration companies. A specialist in SAP, it handles everything from strategic consulting to implementation and information systems management once the site goes live. Cap Gemini has dedicated 25 percent of its workforce to handle SAP projects and, in Belgium alone, has 80 SAP consultants and developers.

After weighing the alternatives, the team of Cap Gemini consultants handling the pre-study advised Toyota to migrate to R/3™. Once this decision was made, project work began in December 1997.

The task at hand was tremendous. Altogether, data relating to 540,000 stock locations at company warehouses had to be converted. Timing issues added to the difficulty. "The major problem this decision imposed was one of implementation time," explains Ortwyn De Vos, project manager for Cap Gemini. "Toyota Belgium has a policy of not making fundamental changes to its organization in order to fit a packaged application, instead tailoring the package as much as possible to fit the organization's needs. At the time, this would have meant additional development resources to get the application running according to Toyota's strict business requirements."

Picking Up Speed and Maneuverability

Practically speaking, meeting Toyota's exacting needs would add another layer of complexity to the project work. Including the amount of time required for data conversion developments, this could mean a total project life cycle of more than one year before start-up. But when the decision was made to migrate to R/3™, only 12 months remained before the legacy application running the key spare-parts system and the financial program would cease to work.

Under pressure to complete the project within such a narrow time frame, Cap Gemini turned to SNAPpack Data Migrator from Information Builders.

"In order to meet our deadline, we looked for a solution that would speed up data conversion and reduce our need for extra human resources," explains De Vos. "In addition, we needed a high degree of flexibility in implementing and modifying data conversions.

"One of the problems was that the project team did not have the expertise to do data extraction on the finance legacy system," De Vos adds. "So we also looked for a tool that could support migrations from the mainframe system." The data files were in VSAM and DL/1, two of more than 80 data sources accessible by SNAPpack Data Migrator.

A Race to the Finish

Certified by SAP in 1997, SNAPpack Data Migrator seamlessly operates with R/3™ to build conversions and interfaces. As an end-to-end solution, Data Migrator handles all elements of data conversion – from planning and design to execution and control.

Two full-time Cap Gemini consultants, aided by a part-time worker, began the task of data extraction and conversion for the application in April 1998. The advantages of using Data Migrator were noticed almost immediately, as the efforts required to establish each interface were greatly reduced from what would typically be expected. Moreover, modifications were easy to apply.

To reduce the need for expertise in legacy systems, Information Builders' FOCUS was used on the mainframe to allow extractions based on queries, independently from the database used in the legacy application. To everyone's satisfaction, the conversion of all data was completed on September 1, 1998, with plenty of time to spare before the December deadline.

Now It's Full Speed Ahead

Having taken up the challenge, Cap Gemini implemented the new R/3™ system using Data Migrator from Information Builders in half the time it would normally take. They also met a key user requirement of testing the new application on live (migrated data), not manually entered data.

"If we had tried to do this in ABAP, it would have been impossible," says De Vos. "Without Data Migrator, we would have needed five people. In addition to this, our cooperation and interaction with Information Builders Belgium has been excellent.

"On the mainframe side, it took only five days to map all of the data from the financial application into the data dictionary," he adds. "Before we began, we didn't think this was possible. Information Builders was the only vendor with the tools to support the entire process – from source to target systems."

Ortwyn De Vos feels the added expense was well worth it, saving him money in the long run. "The investment in Data Migrator wasn't expensive, considering the total project cost and the resource risk," he emphasizes. "Reducing our data conversion resources from five to two full-time consultants was enough to validate this product."

With the data conversion having been completed so smoothly and efficiently, the new SAP R/3™ application is running according to plan. Toyota Belgium can now apply its full energies to what it does best – providing exceptional support services for its many customers.