The Business Information System In Toyota Marketing Essay

Toyota Motor Corporation, commonly known simply as Toyota and abbreviated as TMC, is a multinational corporation headquartered in Japan. The company was founded by Kiichiro Toyoda in 1937 as a spinoff from his father’s company Toyota Industries to create automobiles.

Business Information System [1] or just Information System is a system that collect, store and process all information about customer, production… And the basis of an information system is the sharing and processing of information and ideas. Computers and telecommunication technologies have become essential information system components. From that information, organization will make decisions to improve effect in production, reducing cost, creating competitive advantage, making strategy planning for their organization.

Toyota is one of top brand on the world, to make that successful, they have suitable strategies for operation in current time and future. To make it, they need an information system to help them decide strategies planning for their organization. It will provide information about customers needs; trend of market…, and from that, Toyota can improve their activities to satisfy customers to make successful.

E-Lab, our springboard for promoting IT ERP is a business management system that integrates all faces of the business, including strategies planning, manufacturing, sales, and marketing. As the ERP has become more popular, software applications have improved to help business managers implement ERP in business activities such as inventory control, order tracking, customer service, finance and human resources. Because ERP is so important, Toyota understood that, so they are serious in investing for ERP, such as they build a center is called E-lab to promote IT and improve their ERP.

ERP [2] (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems help Toyota improve management and to allow make decision through universal access to a management database. They use ERP to upgrade our accounting, procurement, personnel and production management.

As you know, the initial cost for ERP is so high, because of that, they decided to replace business-critical systems with open source business applications for ERP , and use it to make solution for the problem that each year, Toyota offers its worldwide marketing subsidiaries a range of vehicles with some 20 million configuration options. Toyota has to create the range which is most likely the successful in the UK market. To operate successfully, the company has to understand trends of the marketplace and respond for opportunities and challenges.

 To process these challenges, Toyota [3] analyzed and developed a revolution method which would allow each major component is specified, implemented, verified and adopted before moving on to the next. This supported the need for a business change strategy, and can be implementation for new or replaced business application had to be attracted by the user community.

Toyota’s strategic technical architecture:

DB2 (RDBMS)

IBM WebSphere Application Server (Application Server)

IBM WebSphere ESB 6.1 (SOA Enterprise Service Bus)

IBM HTTP Server (Web Server)

Linux OS

And the result is no license fees – reducing cost, and provide Product Lifecycle Management to ensure that the architectural approach will stand the test of time, it also developed a Product Model which is sufficiently flexible to support not only today’s needs, but also undefined future product strategies and the potential for ultimate integration with external systems, whether in-house or elsewhere in the supply chain.

Beside that, ERP helped company find the best design process to get more affection in production, and accounting applications, it can integrate the cost, profit, and revenue information of sales that are made. So ERP takes an important part in organization and so useful for them.

Artificial Intelligence:

In May 2002, Toyota established “e-Lab,” an information technology research laboratory to improve IT. Toyota [4] creates new businesses and further improves the added value of our products. The e-Lab will study the feasibility of digital technologies in enabling production line simulations necessary to shorten the lead time from product development to manufacture. They are developing products by exchanging digital information on every process from development to procurement to manufacture, and enabling shorter product development lead-times. By using three-dimensional CAD – Computer-aided design systems, and other systems, they are reducing man-day and product development costs.

Toyota Lift Trucks

They use IT resource combines with other product type to make competitive advantage. Toyota is developing and manufacturing information systems – the Warehouse Management System (WMS), and the stocking management system for automatic warehouses, they combined with the logistics equipment of TOYOTA Material Handling Company, is a company under Toyota brand Toyota, it produce lift truck supplier in the U.S. since 2002 and currently offers a full line of high-quality lift trucks. They are able to provide their customers with optimized logistics solutions at their worksite. The automatic warehouse and lift truck.

Beside that, Toyota also using Information Technology to improve their current product such as Toyota develops Artificial Intelligence for brakes [5] . In this case of Toyota, a tool is developed to detect speed and give an notice, so in case of an accident can happen, the car can anticipate and suggest the driver to slow down, if he rejects the suggestion, the car would push the brake and slow down the speed. It will safer for driver when they are not in active position and decrease accident ratio. That system is called AI Shift Control. One of the modern ECT – Electronically Controlled Transmission features, it provides the ability can “read” the driver’s intentions and to “read” hills, AI Shift Control [6] is a transmission algorithm designed to manage the shift system according to road conditions and driver behavior. It uses data on accelerator pedal angle and rate of change, throttle angle and engine speed.

Toyota pays more attention in develop IT and use it in their business to improve quality of their products, creating the competitive advantages because their products will have more feature, safety. Besides that, using Artificial Intelligent in production line will save cost of product; make product is cheaper with the same quality.

Customer Relationship Management:

Customer Relationship Management is a process that learns about customer’s needs, wants and their behavior to create a strong relationship with them. CRM will help company understand more about their customer and make them satisfy, it also use to know the trend of current market. Because that, organization can make marketing plan, improve their activities to get more market share and earn profit.

Toyota creates a success strategy that manages both manufacturing and non-manufacturing environment. It is called Lean CRM, it response for the growing volume of collecting customer information during the customer lifecycle. It helps Toyota make changes in customer’s behavior and increase customer satisfaction. It also enabled Toyota sell more products with a shorter trade cycle, high repurchase rate and lower cost.

Customer pull:

A typical customer will replace vehicle after three to eight years using it. So Toyota make customer has to think about their product when they want a new car. And Toyota’s marketing will guide the potential customer to Toyota website, where they can discover and request further information. That is called “customer pull [7] “, where Toyota responds directly to the customer, make customer know about Toyota, that is the first point.

Toyota push:

Now, Toyota knows what the customer need by the information that customers provide, so they will help customer make the right choice for their demand. That is call “smart Toyota push [8] “. In case to collect more information, they will send out a customer offer.

Customer DNA:

This is the heart of Toyota’s Lean CRM, it is like real DNA, identify individual customer through customer pull and Toyota push. It will make Toyota understand the recent customer need, behavior and provide the best way for them when need a new product or service.

By that way, Toyota can provide exactly what customer wants with less cost and save time.

Toyota has success in creating a strong relationship with their customers by create a correct strategy in Customer Relationship Management. They make a lot of convenient for customer when they come to Toyota. Customers are easy to discover the feature of Toyota’s product by surf web or go to a physical store. Customers also use their cell phone to access Toyota website because they create mobile interface for their website. Besides that, Toyota also cares about people who bought their product, they have a database of all customers, and they are serious in creating customer’s loyalty with their organization. They do the best things for their consumers and make them satisfy with high quality product and customer service. Such as in 2009, Toyota recalled 1.8 million cars in European because the problem of pedal.

Conclusion:

In nowadays, information is very important, it is like the lifeblood of any organization. It is an important part of organization, help them in reducing cost, making competitive advantages, and create strategies planning… Information systems include hardware, software, data, applications, communication and people. It helps an organization to better manage and secure its critical corporate, customer and employee data. Information systems also improve integration and work processes…and more benefits. For example, production scheduling information system will store information about production activities; human resource information system will store information about human resources, and so on.

We could say that every reactive system may have a subsystem that can be considered as an information system whose objective is to monitor and control such a system. The main functions of an information system may be input, processing, output, storage and control at work place.

Toyota has the success as now because they know the important of information system, they invest for it and get more result from it. The biggest strength of Toyota’s information systems is their ability to integrate their company goals by using their systems effectively. They use automatic system and robotic in production to reducing cost, using information system to create competitive advantages and support strategy planning.