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Mainframe services case studies

Computacenter Mainframe Services:
Case Study - Toyota

Introduction

Toyota Motor Corporation is one of the world’s leading automotive manufacturers, and it was established in 1937. In 2005, Toyota sold over 8 million vehicles worldwide. It employs over 264,000 people around the world. Over four decades, Toyota has developed a strong presence throughout Europe, where it has invested over €6 billion since 1990 and employs 55,000 people.

Toyota’s operations in Europe are supported by a network of 28 national marketing and sales companies covering 48 countries, a total of almost 3,000 sales outlets and eight manufacturing plants.

Toyota aims to grow in harmony with all of its stakeholders, including clients, employees, shareholders, business partners and society at large.

The manufacturing mainframe system is based in Burnaston, Derby and fully supports all Toyota’s car manufacturing and engine plants in the UK, France, Turkey and Poland. It also supports a large number of distribution points across Europe, and, of course, all the suppliers, parts and logistics requirements.

The nature of this business requires 24-hour, 7-day availability and maximum reliability of all key systems. Over the past 10 years the system at Derby has supported over 10,000,000 jobs run, 3,000,000 vehicles planned and 6 billion parts ordered, received and paid for.

Business Challenge

Over a period of more than 10 years, Toyota developed a complex and effective automated operations and scheduling environment. This enabled the manufacturing computer systems to run 24-hours a day, unattended, with lights-out, minimum support staff and negligible downtime.

The solution had been built over time using several Computer Associates (CA) products, which had been heavily linked, developed and modified. However, the strategic direction for Toyota Europe was to move away from CA, the potential cost benefits made a migration project viable.

Solution

Several products were evaluated, and the decision was taken to implement an IBM software solution using Tivoli Workload Scheduler and System Automation. The project would embrace not only the installation and customisation of the new products, but also a detailed analysis of the existing processes and a semi-automated conversion methodology.

Furthermore, the old/new schedulers and automation products were required to coexist and cross-communicate during the migration project. No major downtime could be arranged for conversions or migrations to take place – the company would continue full operations and manufacturing throughout the project.

Result

After initial scoping and analysis, the project was executed by a small team of Computacenter specialists, working closely with key Toyota staff. The conversion of the scheduling package (Jobtrac) and the automation (OPS/MVS) took place simultaneously. The products were complex and interconnected. An initial task was to design a mechanism which allowed the old and new schedulers, along with the automation products, to work together and communicate effectively.

For the automation product, a total of over 1,700 automation rules and rexxes were converted over four z/OS images. Many new features were exploited to streamline and to improve the existing automation. For example, the ability to manage automation across the sysplex, from any system, and to manage and control all aspects of the IMS and DB2 subsystems.

After initial product installation, customisation and familiarisation, a detailed analysis and audit of the existing processes and procedures took place. Automation was classified into ‘functions’, rather than just looking at individual rexxes and rules, which were converted in a staged manner. In some cases, the new code was rolled out on an image-by-image basis, whereas other solutions could be implemented across the entire sysplex at one time.

For the scheduling product, several hundred schedules, over 4,500 jobs, many thousands of dependencies and links were converted from Jobtrac to TWS over an extended period of time. The applications were analysed and divided into phases, each being given a business impact and importance rating, and then converted in an appropriate order. The initial installation, customisation and design of interfaces took place over four months, with actual migration of applications being divided into 10 phases and executed in parallel with other development and conversion activities.

The entire conversion project was successfully completed on time and well before the deadline imposed by the CA licence expiry.

Benefits

Overall, the benefits have been far reaching and include the following.

  • Removal of a non-strategic, CA product set to prepare for integration into a consolidated European data centre.
  • The streamlining and improvement of over 10 years’ development and evolution.
  • An opportunity to use IBM’s latest software and technology to further develop the concept of ‘full, unattended operations’ for manufacturing computer systems.
  • Significant cost benefits, with ROI in just over two years.
  • Considerable year-on-year savings following initial ROI.