Toyota Motorsport finds right formula

IT spending is reduced following use of systems management tools

Toyota Motorsport has cut its IT budget from eight to six per cent of the company’s total spending in just six months since installing performance management software.

The team has competed in motor racing since the 1950s, but needed to update its IT strategy when it entered Formula One (F1) four years ago.

It has deployed server and database performance and asset management tools from vendor BMC to gain a better understanding of how its technology assets operate at any given time.

This is particularly important as the IT resources are responsible for the end-to-end design and manufacturing process for F1 cars at a purpose-built facility in Cologne.

‘IT had a lot of customers and was overwhelmed by all the requests,’ Thomas Schiller, Toyota Motorsport chief information officer, told Computing.

‘We started to think about managing the IT in terms of what our IT objectives were.

‘We needed more effective resource use and to focus on what makes the car quicker.’

Toyota has rationalised its IT and matched it to the needs and aspirations of the F1 motor racing business, making IT a more cost-effective operation.

The team has handed the day-to-day running of its IT infrastructure to corporate division Toyota Information Systems, but implemented the BMC tools as a new layer of management software to monitor and control IT resources.

‘A major question was to identify the over- and under-supported areas of our IT use,’ said Schiller. ‘Business service management tools help us do that.’

The software tracks and measures the availability of underlying IT infrastructure components, so the Toyota Motorsport IT team can immediately identify root causes of IT problems or outages, and identify potential problems before they happen.

‘We first used management measures of service levels,’ said Schiller. ‘And the business service management suite delivered a 20 per cent reduction in our IT asset use, including design workstations and application licences.

‘We have saved 15 per cent of our costs by consolidating our server environment. And we have had no downtime since implementation, except scheduled maintenance.’