Toyota Financial Services

Toyota Financial Services is a wholly-owned subsidiary of car-manufacturing giant Toyota. Charting a 75 year history, Toyota is headquartered in Japan and reported profits for the last financial year of US$9.7 billion. Offering finance related services for customers, business clients and dealerships, Toyota Financial Services has three regional offices worldwide of which one, the Europe/Africa office,is based in London.

Covering 14 countries, Toyota Financial Services Europe/Africa office faced multiple IT challenges. With email volumes growing beyond a manageable level and the IT department facing staff connectivity requests for different devices, Toyota Financial Services needed to start thinking of solutions. This included assessing options for developing their archiving function and improving connectivity for staff. As with any global company thought’s never as simple as just choosing a solution and rolling it out.

TFS also had to consider what the other Toyota companies within the group were doing – ensuring their solution would draw the whole picture together.

Offering remote support to 1500 users, in 14 different countries, Toyota Financial Services knew the wider team would benefit from a more centralised solution, which they could better manage from the UK.

bluesource was recommended to Toyota Financial Services through Veritas for its Enterprise Vault expertise – though it quickly became apparent that they could help with much more than archiving. A Veritas preferred partner, bluesource quickly assisted Toyota Financial Services assess the benefits of a much wider email system upgrade. Offering a combination of onsite and remote support, and conducting a series of workshops, bluesource designed an EV and Exchange solution, with a Skype for Business environment, which could be implemented by Toyota Financial Services over the course of several months he rollout was a staged process across the 14 different countries with a Toyota Financial Services presence.

This approach brought the benefits of smaller individual roll-outs – also reducing the complication of dealing with so many teams – over a long time frame

“We just had too much mail! We were using IBM Notes and Domino, but wanted to explore other options”

Toyota Financial Services has been able to streamline the regional messaging systems, UK centralisation has helped Hemant’s team gain added control of important international systems, and a much more efficient way of working.

While EV provides a better archiving solution for existing email data, the improved IM functionality and connectivity of Exchange and Lync has helped to reduce new message volumes considerably.

24×7 technical support for Enterprise Vault is provided directly by bluesource, which means TFS’s IT team can focus on the Microsoft side of things and escalate any technical issues or questions about EV to specialists.

“We wanted to improve the whole user experience and it became clear that an Exchange solution was going to be a good fit for us.”

Hemant Sohoni

Team Leader