Toyota Motor Corporation

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Systemwalker WebMGR's service level monitoring and log analysis capabilities lead to dramatic performance improvements

Feature Story of Middleware Products for the Broadband Internet Age

Toyota's official website, "TOYOTA INTERNET DRIVE (TID)", has grown into a large-scale site that receives 60 million hits per month. In the autumn of 2001, a major systems restructure was undertaken to install "Systemwalker WebMGR," Fujitsu's total operation management solution for Web systems. Systemwalker WebMGR monitors the response time for displaying the site's top page at intervals of three minutes. It also enables the Web content department to immediately view log results for analysis of popular Web pages and assessment of response times.

Toyota Motor Corporation is increasing its presence as global competition intensifies.

Actively involved in e-business, it uses the Internet to strengthen ties with its consumers.

The company's e-TOYOTA Division was created in January 2002 from the reorganization of its predecessor, the GAZOO Division.

"Toyota's presence on the Internet consists of our official site 'TID', GAZOO, which provides automobile-oriented services, as well as many other sites operated by individual departments," explains Mr. Kunihiko Nakano, General Manager of the Planning and Administration Department of the e-TOYOTA Division. "The e-TOYOTA Division is positioned as a flag-bearer for unifying the Toyota brand on the Web, and the e-TOYOTA Division name also signifies its role in coordinating Toyota's B2C business."

Because TID is Toyota's official site, it provides not only automobile-related material, but also a wide range of other information, including corporate information.

"The e-TOYOTA Division was established by gathering experts from various departments such as Marketing, Public Relations and Systems."

"We are currently restructuring a number of areas of the site to make Toyota's overall B2C business more user-friendly," adds Mr. Susumu Chatani, Group Manager of the Planning and Administration Department of the e-TOYOTA Division.

At present, approximately 50 departments within Toyota are associated with TID.

In the past, when Web content from each department was separately prepared and published on the site, the design and function was not always consistent.

Since the formation of the e-TOYOTA Division, great effort has been put into creating a consistent image for the site. In the autumn of 2001, Toyota chose "Systemwalker WebMGR", Fujitsu's total operation management solution for Web systems, to support the new structure.

"Most of the servers used in the GAZOO system were made by Fujitsu and were using Systemwalker to perform operation management, so Systemwalker actually became the standard used by our department right from the start," explains Mr. Junya Douhara of the Information Systems Department of the e-TOYOTA Division.

Both the GAZOO and TID systems are located in Toyota's Data Center, which began operating last year, with great operational advantages in having Systemwalker installed on both systems.

GAZOO principally uses Windows and TID uses UNIX, but Systemwalker forms the bridge between the two platforms.

Systemwalker makes it possible to manage both systems in the same way, and simplifies overall control.

The number of accesses to TID has almost doubled over the past two years.

Because the site is accessed by a large number of general users, careful attention must be paid to factors such as display response times that affect the level of service experienced by users.

TID uses the "Systemwalker WebMGR Browser Agent" to monitor Web page display response times.

"A terminal, located outside the Data Center, automatically displays response times every three minutes," explains Mr. Douhara. "We had a lot of trouble trying to create the same mechanism for GAZOO by ourselves. With Systemwalker, however, it was achieved in no time at all."

During construction of the TID website, the aim was to maintain response times of no more than four seconds for at least 95% of Web pages.

The TID system easily achieves this goal with room to spare. In addition, if a problem is detected, an alarm mechanism is in place to notify the system administrator immediately.

Systemwalker is not only used to monitor the TID system, but the entire network as well.

Installing Systemwalker gives many benefits.

The Web content department is now able to obtain the information it needs at any time via the Intranet, whereas in the past, log analysis results were compiled into printed reports and distributed on a daily or weekly basis.

Previously, the Web content department occasionally required the log results to be prepared for analysis by outside suppliers. This cost has now been eliminated.

Mr. Hidehiko Sasaki, Assistant Manager of the Planning and Operations Group attached to the Planning and Administration Department of the e-TOYOTA Division, explains: "All departments have a keen interest in how the content that they create is viewed, and that is why they request detailed information from us, the administrators of TID. The delivery of reports used to be very time-consuming because we had to process access log information each time it was required. Systemwalker WebMGR is equipped with just about every function that we need, so it has been a great help to us. It is also very popular among the departments that create Web content."

TID receives two million hits each day, and thanks to "Systemwalker WebMGR", log analysis information is available each morning.

Mr. Chatani explained his view of the future of TID.

"To date, each department developed its own content using the methods that they thought best, making TID a partially optimized collection of sites. Up until now there has been duplication of information which we wanted to improve and ultimately aimed for full optimization."

The goal of full optimization of Toyota's production system has been in place since the company's alignment with Toyota's "Just In Time" philosophy. In one respect, it is the DNA of Toyota.

It may not be long before TID achieves the ideal envisaged by Mr. Chatani.

In addition, due to the strict requirements of the e-TOYOTA Division, there is little doubt that Systemwalker will evolve as well.

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Toyota Motor Corporation

Head Office: 1 Toyota-cho, Toyota-shi, Aichi Prefecture, Japan

Established: August 1937

Capital: 397 billion yen (as of the end of March 2002)

Number of employees: 66820 (as of the end of March 2002)

Consolidated sales: 15106.3 billion yen (2001)

Business overview:

Toyota is Japan's largest and the world's third-largest automobile manufacturer. It produces six million cars each year.
By the settlement of accounts in March 2002, it became the first Japanese company to achieve consolidated pre-tax income of one trillion yen.

URL: http://www.toyota.co.jp/en/