The following case occurred with the Toyota subsidiary in the United States:
In the late 1990s, Toyota U.S.A. faced major problems in its supply chain operations. Car storage costs rose, and they were no longer able to deliver products to customers on time. Management used computers that generated a huge amount of data and reports that were not used strategically, were not always accurate, and were often provided too late—making timely decision-making difficult.
Barbra Cooper, CIO, identified several problems. The first was the need for a Data Warehouse—a centralized, organized, and easily accessible data repository. She also detected the need to implement software tools to process, explore, and manipulate this data. A real-time delivery system was then deployed, but unfortunately, it did not work correctly. The historical data input included years of unnoticed human errors, duplicate and inconsistent data, and a lack of crucial information. All of this led to hasty analyses, conclusions, and forecasts regarding the distributor's operations.
In 1999, the corporation decided to implement a Business Intelligence platform. Within days, the system showed positive results. Through it, for example, they discovered that the company was being double-billed for a special rail shipment (an $800,000.00 mistake!).
Between 2001 and 2005, the volume of cars traded increased by 40%, and transit time was reduced by 5%. These and several other benefits helped Toyota achieve the highest profit margins in the automotive market since 2003, and they have been consistently increasing every year. Furthermore, a study conducted by IDC Inc. in 2011 indicated that the institution achieved a return of at least 506% on its BI investment up to that date.
This is just one of countless cases illustrating the inefficiency of legacy systems that are unable to meet the massive demand for data that the information age brings. The great challenge today is to integrate and interpret them, transforming them into relevant information and thus enabling the proper creation of knowledge. Through the management of this knowledge, intelligence is born!
More than 15 years have passed since the Toyota incident, but today there are still many companies that do not properly utilize the data and information existing in their databases. And you, what do you do with the data generated by your systems?