Toyota Monitors Vital Parts of Inventory Functions with MessengerConsole
Reprising one of the most popular songs of the 1960s, one of the most memorable advertising programs in recent years has firmly established Toyota as the automobile for "everyday people." But the "everyday" theme is more than simply an advertising mantra to Doug Sowers and his staff of computer technicians and programmers at Toyota Motor Sales in Torrance, Calif.
Sowers, an analyst/project leader, is assigned to Toyota Logistics Services with responsibility for maintaining the integrity of production data from remote computer systems at Toyota assembly facilities throughout the United States and Canada. Sowers is based in the Los Angeles-area city of Torrance, the core of computer operations for a network linking nine remote Toyota facilities in Jacksonville; Baltimore; Newark; Georgetown, Kentucky; Portland; Fremont, Calif., Long Beach, Calif., Gibson County, Indiana; and Cambridge, Ont., Canada. While the Cambridge, Georgetown and Fremont facilities are manufacturing plants, the others are assembly sites in which Toyota automobiles are accessorized before being routed to individual dealers.
Toyota Motor Sales tracks the manufacture, shipment, accessorization and delivery of every automobile through its computer network. It is the function of the computer systems in each of the remote locations to record a listing of the specific accessories that are added to each vehicle, and transfer that data to the central AS/400 model 620 "development box" in Torrance that Sowers oversees.
Originally, that so-called "KANBAN" process was performed manually by workers in the assembly plants who filled out accessory information for each vehicle on cards. Toyota decided to modernize the recording procedure of this mission-critical function in 1991, when the company installed a comprehensive data system with hardware at each assembly plant to maintain inventory data and order parts at predetermined levels. Computer programmers were hired to staff each site, but since data functions did not require their full-time attention, they were assigned to other functions, and checked computer operations as time allowed. The result was not favorable.
"As problems occurred, they weren't necessarily discovered right away," said Sowers. "Sometimes I wouldn't learn about a problem until three days had passed." One such episode resulted in failure to fulfill a delivery order for vehicles from a dealer, who lost sales in the process. Without question, the systems needed more up-to-date monitoring. Every day.
The Solution
Sowers knew that a solution resided in an automated AS/400 monitoring system. After evaluating three monitoring packages, he chose MessengerConsole from Bytware, largely because of their ability to check active jobs. That function has proven particularly useful for Toyota in tracking "communication jobs"—data sent back and forth between remote sites and Toyota's host computer in Torrance.
"If a communication job is down or not running by its designated time, MessengerConsole can call it up, and then send an alert after three attempts to activate the job function," said Sowers. "MessengerConsole can be programmed to go to the job level, which means it isn't necessary to wait until an error has materialized to initiate corrective action."
MessengerConsole is a centralized operations consoling solution designed for monitoring and managing software- and hardware-related messages and events occurring on a network of AS/400s. Intended for companies with multiple remote and local unattended AS/400s, MessengerConsole displays all unanswered events for any number of remote AS/400s. MessengerConsole enables paging and dispatching via e-mail, PCS Digital cellular phones, pagers, and computer workstations by means of a graphical client interface for users lacking 5250 emulation.
MessengerConsole routes events from a remote AS/400 to a local computer, enabling operators to respond directly to messages and events without signing onto or passing through the originating system. MessengerConsole also can be programmed to trigger actions on remote systems in response to predetermined conditions that the system administrator specifies. It uses IBM Advanced Program-to-Program Communications (APPC) to communicate between systems, and will operate over various connectivity protocols available for the AS/400, including SNA, TCP/IP, LAN/WAN and others. When used with remote systems that are configured as a dial-up connection, MessengerConsole automatically establishes a connection with the originating remote system when an event is exported. Programmed to close a dial-up communications link after a specified period of inactivity, MessengerConsole re-establishes the connection in order to send a reply.
Part of the appeal of MessengerConsole is its adaptability to existing communications networks. In most cases, no additional lines, controllers or communication devices are required. Toyota's computers are interconnected over a Token Ring frame relay network, upon which MessengerConsole rides.
Sowers said MessengerConsole paid for itself within the first month of their installation in the Long Beach site in the spring of 1997. While in the process of running a critical month-end routine, a vehicle accounting application malfunctioned. The problem occurred at 8 o'clock one evening just as the computer was about to run its IPL (initial program load) sequence and turn off for the night.
Vehicle accounting is a process to track locations of vehicles and their accessorization with equipment such as CD players, carpeted floor mats, alarm systems, and running boards and roof racks for sport utility vehicles. Toyota manufactures many of its Camry, Corolla, Avalon, Sienna minivan and Tacoma and T100 pickup truck models in the United States. Vehicle information is used to generate the accessory list that appears on stickers. "If the sticker isn't right, that's a legal issue," observed Sowers.
"The people in Vehicle Accounting wouldn't have discovered the problem until checking the computer three days later. Missing that window is a real problem because then that data must be compiled manually, creating a real drain on personnel. Tracking a month's worth of activity and putting transactions in proper sequence is a four- to five-week venture," said Sowers, an electrical engineer by training but an applications programmer by practice. "MessengerConsole caught the error right away. It notified me there was problem, and identified the job. In terms of the staff time it saved, MessengerConsole paid for itself within the first month."
An "event queue" function in MessengerConsole allows users to establish priorities and scheduling for designated events. That capability enables system administrators to export events after an elapsed time period; export events during specific time periods, such as weekends or during unattended operations; automatically trigger actions such as sending a pager message or submitting a job; display events from other systems in colors and sound alarms; automatically route a remote event to a specific user or groups of users; and export events programmatically using actions, such as designating an action only after the third "I" reply to a "file full" message.
Automatic functions may be easily overridden, enabling a local operator to manually forward an event to a remote system. An operator can quickly and easily view a log of the events that have been exported to a remote system. MessengerConsole also enables an operator to easily switch to another remote system in the case of system outage.
MessengerConsole also can automatically trigger actions on a local system when a remote operator answers an event with a specific reply. For example, MessengerConsole can submit a job when a remote operator replies "G" to an inquiry message.
Sowers praises the extent to which users can customize MessengerConsole to suit the needs of individual users. He set MessengerConsole on each of the remote installations to check certain functions every five minutes and send a transmission to the central computer in Torrance. The monitoring function operates 24 hours per day. The process is fairly straightforward.
"When a problem in a remote site triggers a setting in MessengerConsole, it sends an alert across the net to the development machine, and it's all done by remote control," said Sowers confidently. "We do have a person assigned at each of the remote sites to change tapes, but all programming is done here in Torrance."
At one of the remote Toyota sites a KANBAN routine is run every minute because of critical need to coincide parts availability. "That's programmed into MessengerConsole. When a particular part reaches a low level, the system creates a parts order for Toyota's North American Parts and Logistics Division for fulfillment by a facility in California, Ontario or Toledo, Ohio.
Toyota, which builds vehicles in 26 countries, is the fourth-largest automobile manufacturer in the United States, where it employs more than 23,000 workers in manufacturing, design, research, sales and finance. Toyota Motor Corp. began construction of its first wholly-owned United States automobile manufacturing plant in Georgegown, Kentucky in 1986. Production at Toyota's vehicle and parts manufacturing plants in North America was expected to total 1.2 million vehicles for the 1998 calendar year. More than 60 percent of the Toyota and Lexus vehicles sold in the United States during 1997 were built in North America.
Since installing MessengerConsole, Sowers says the automated functions that he has chosen enable him to concentrate more on project management. "I don't get paged half as much as I used to," he smiles. "And when I do get a call, I'm alerted soon enough to solve problems before they blow out of proportion."
MessengerConsole helps keep Toyota running. Every day.
Resource Details
Type: Case Study
Product: MessengerConsole
Customer: Toyota
Summary
As Toyota tracks the manufacture, shipment, accessorization, and delivery of every automobile through its computer network, it relies on MessengerConsole to monitors all local and remote systems to catch and correct problems before they can impact production.
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