Toyota Motor Corporation Australia Ltd. (TMCA) manufactures cars, trucks, SUVs, hybrids, and vans. Innovation and sustainability are key elements of the company’s strategy. Their vision is to pursue a business that works toward harmony with people, society, and the global environment. It’s a principle that they follow since Toyota Australia started in 1963 and has helped cement their position as Australia’s leading automotive company.
As a subsidiary of Japan’s Toyota Motor Corporation, they market Toyota vehicles, including Lexus, also managing business operations for Toyota in Australia.
To advance their digital transformation, they worked with SAP and the SAP AppHaus Network partner Bourne Digital to create a solution for managing the Lexus extended loyalty program and provide value-adding rewards and services to Lexus customers with the aim to seamlessly integrate their various IT systems in order to create a unique user experience.
Creating more innovative mobility solutions with integrated SAP products
In a five-month project, Toyota and Bourne Digital strived to integrate several complex, disparate processes across the SAP ERP application and third-party IT systems to develop a solution that provides an intuitive, real-time dashboard for employees.
First field for improvement was to create a better loyalty program experience for customers. Especially challenging was the fully virtual collaboration due to the lockdown scenario in Melbourne. It did not allow for a single personal meeting. But Bourne Digital did not let the pandemic stop or slow down this project.
A team of key Lexus end users and project team members were involved for every step of the Design Thinking journey to provide remote end user input, testing validation and feedback. Multiple Design Thinking workshops were held to work through the five use cases following SAP’s Human-Centered Approach to Innovation to define requirements for the envisioned solution. They made use of the Innovation Toolkit for Virtual Collaboration provided by the SAP AppHaus, as well as the official SAP AppHaus Mural templates for efficient brainstorming and design ideas.
Multiple process and user flow sessions for each step of the package journey were facilitated by a Bourne Digital UX Designer and Business Analyst. There were seven design validation workshops with Lexus end users over the course of four weeks to confirm the design before the Bourne Digital team moved into the build phase. Technical interviews were conducted with affiliated program vendors to understand the data being received into the app and validate any technical restrictions and limitations of the design.
Results showed that the solution should be able to:
- manage each customer loyalty package
- manage pricing elements and business logic in Business Results related to service redemption events
- manage the account balances of each package in real time
- post sales orders/credits and journal postings to SAP ERP
- compile spend analytics data to capture Purchase Requisitions for each vendor
- provide detailed reporting and analysis options for the Lexus Encore rewards program
Transforming business processes with SAP Business Technology Platform
SAP’s Human-Centered Approach to Innovation helped tremendously transform enterprise applications into customer value, based on SAP Business Technology Platform. With the help of SAP Integration Suite and SAP Extension Suite, TMCA and Bourne Digital were able to seamlessly connect various IT systems end-to-end across the entire IT landscape and actively manage and report on the rewards program. They also implemented SAPUI5 applications to provide a rich user experience.
This is innovation!
With its new, integrated “Cloud Rewards Management” solution, TMCA business staff now has access to a set of account management services and applications using the SAP Integration Suite and Portal service. The solution manages each of the Lexus extended loyalty accounts and automates and orchestrates the related transactions between all relevant parties. TMCA employees also have access to real-time dashboards to report on the loyalty rewards accounts. Key features include the ability to:
- capture salesforce events triggered by dealers and customers
- run Business Rules APIs
- trigger updates to SAP HANA Cloud and SAP ERP
- provide business logic to integration services
- create services for expense management applications
With SAP Integration Suite we connected to SAP and third-party systems, allowing TMCA to provide a seamless approach to managing the Lexus rewards program. With SAP Extension Suite we persisted data on SAP HANA Cloud and built integration and reporting services consumed by SAPUI5 applications to provide reporting insights and a delightful user experience to Lexus staff. Having architected this solution, I was inspired by the ease of integrating, extending and simplifying complex components. This is innovation!
– Phil Cooley, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Bourne Digital Pty. Ltd.
Meeting the needs of the market, both now and in the future
The project went live in September 2020, being productive with 0 bugs reported. The integrated, mobile solution enables TMCA employees to track and manage external vendor and customer activities within the Lexus Encore Platinum Program. The costs of integration have been reduced to 50% by implementing SAP Integration Suite. The new solution enables automated end-to-end transactions and payment of vendors for services redeemed by Lexus customers as well as automated reporting with a real-time dashboard for Lexus Encore program insights. This integrated IT landscape supports employees and customers interactions and results in a delightful user experience with integrated SAPUI5 applications. The mobility services streamlined account management activities and have been extended across 292 TMCA subsidiaries and 707 branches.
Using SAP Integration Suite allows us to leverage our existing SAP investment and enabled us to rapidly deploy a robust solution in a highly complex landscape of systems that included legacy and modern applications.
– Krishna Patil, Solution Architect, Toyota Motor Corporation Australia Ltd.
Head start into a digitalized future
The implementation of SAP Integration Suite set up a baseline for future TMCA innovation projects together with SAP. The fast implementation — 20 weeks from start to finish — resulted in a dramatic acceleration of the digital transformation of their business processes. It enabled a 30% faster time-to-market due to quicker development time frames with the help of integration. TMCA is now well prepared for the future; and Bourne Digital looks forward to collaborating on many more innovation projects with them.