Microsoft Windows Server SystemCustomer Solution Case Study

Web Portal Saves Toyota and Dealers Millions Per Year and Accelerates Delivery of New Business Value

OverviewCountry: United StatesIndustry: Automotive

Customer ProfileToyota Motor Sales USA (TMS) is the U.S. sales organization for Toyota Motor Corporation, the second largest automaker in the world based on global sales.

Business SituationTMS needed to replace its aging minicomputer-based solution for communicating with dealers with one that is easy to manage and would accelerate the delivery of new business value.

SolutionDealer Daily, based on Microsoft® Windows Server SystemTM, is a comprehensive, easy-to-manage Web portal that connects Toyota and Lexus dealerships with one another, TMS, and third-party suppliers.

Benefits Saves dealerships hundreds of

millions of dollars over the next five years

Saves TMS tens of millions of dollars over the next five years

Simple and cost-effective to

“Our Windows Server System–based solution is a key enabler for growth in both revenues and profits.”Ken Goltara, Vice President of Business Systems Development, Toyota Motor Sales USA

The minicomputer-based solution previously used by Toyota Motor Sales (TMS) was expensive to manage and could not support the level of business process integration that TMS wanted to have with its 1,200 Toyota and Lexus dealers. Dealer Daily, the company’s new solution, is a comprehensive, easy-to-manage Web portal built on Microsoft® Windows Server SystemTM, server infrastructure software that incorporates software innovations to help companies do more with less. The solution puts a wealth of information and capabilities at the fingertips of Toyota and Lexus dealers, enabling them to connect with TMS, one another, and third-party suppliers in new and profitable ways. By taking advantage of the management products in Windows Server System, such as Microsoft Operations Manager, TMS has cut the cost of daily management for Dealer Daily by 25 percent and shifted those resources toward the delivery of new features that enhance business growth and profitability. The enhanced productivity and

SituationToyota Motor Sales USA (TMS) is the U.S. sales unit of Toyota Motor Corporation, the second largest manufacturer of automobiles in the world. TMS has continually gained market share over the past several years, with sales increasing from 1.4 million to 1.8 million vehicles between 1997 and 2003. Continuing to fuel that kind of business growth depends heavily on how well the company interacts with and meets the needs of its resellers—in this case, the nationwide network of 1,200 Toyota and Lexus dealers.

Prior to 2000, the primary channel through which TMS interacted with its dealers was the Toyota Dealer Network (TDN), a text-based application that ran on a minicomputer installed at each dealership and invoked applications running on a centralized mainframe located at TMS headquarters in Torrance, California. For TMS and its dealers, the aging legacy system presented several obstacles to maximizing business growth:

Limited productivity—TDN did not integrate with any of the dealer management systems that dealerships use to support their daily business operations: selling vehicles, arranging financing, processing warranty claims, managing parts inventories, and so on. Because of this, dealership personnel had to continually rekey data into multiple applications—a task that left room for errors and

took valuable time away from serving customers.

Poor supportability and manageability—To upgrade TDN, TMS had to create tapes and CDs, mail them to all 1,200 dealers, and then wait for dealers to have the time to load the upgrades—a process that took weeks and cost more than a million dollars to upgrade all 1,200 dealerships. Owing to their labor-intensive nature, upgrades were scheduled only twice a year instead of being driven by business needs.

“We needed a system with greater manageability and flexibility—one that could help to fuel continued business growth,” says Ken Goltara, Vice President of Business Systems Development for Toyota Motor Sales. “We envisioned retiring all minicomputers from dealerships and replacing them with a rich, dynamic, and customizable Web portal that would deliver more functionality, be easier to manage, and improve dealer productivity. We wanted to eliminate the costly and error-prone redundancy of having dealers key in data first to their dealer management systems and then again into their dealer communication systems. And we wanted the solution to work in the most cost-effective way, allowing us to leverage the investment in our mainframe-based systems.”

SolutionDealer Daily, the company’s new solution, is a comprehensive, easy-to-manage Web portal that puts a

“The return on investment for Dealer Daily is greater than anticipated, and its total cost of ownership is right on target.”Zack Hicks, former National Manager for E-Business, Toyota Motor Sales USA

wealth of information and new capabilities at the fingertips of Toyota and Lexus dealers. Built on Microsoft® Windows Server SystemTM integrated server software and developed with the assistance of Microsoft Consulting Services, Dealer Daily connects each of the 1,200 Toyota and Lexus dealers to Toyota Motor Sales and other Toyota subsidiaries, other dealers, and external vendors in new and profitable ways:

Toyota Motor Sales—System-to-system integration between Dealer Daily and dealer management systems enables dealership personnel to perform daily business activities without keying data into multiple systems. Instead, personnel just enter information into the local dealer management system, which forwards that data to Dealer Daily for processing against the TMS mainframe. Results of those transactions are returned by Dealer Daily to the dealer management system in a matter of seconds. Dealer Daily also enables dealers to work more closely with other corporate subsidiaries such as Toyota Financial Services. When a customer wants to finance a vehicle, dealerships can submit a loan application based on already captured customer data through Dealer Daily to Toyota’s financing system (which utilizes an Oracle database running on UNIX), enabling Toyota to respond with an offer in as little as 15 seconds and increasing the chances that Toyota

will win the customer’s financing business as well.

Other dealers—Dealer Daily enables dealerships to communicate and interact with one another in ways that streamline business processes and reduce expenses. For example, Dealer Daily’s pipeline management features enable dealerships to do a “virtual swap” with another dealer before the desired car is shipped from the port to a dealership. In the past, such a swap often required the physical transport of a vehicle after it was delivered to a dealership, at a significant additional expense. For Lexus dealers, Dealer Daily also facilitates the sharing of service information, so that customers can take their vehicles to any dealership and know that the dealership will have a complete history of all work that other Lexus dealerships have performed in the past.

Figure 1: Dealer Daily is a comprehensive, easy-to-manage Web portal through which Toyota and Lexus dealers can interact with Toyota Motor Sales, other dealers, and third-party suppliers.

External vendors—Dealer Daily enables dealerships to conduct business with external vendors such as audio component suppliers and electronic key manufacturers directly through the portal. For example, before Dealer Daily, Lexus dealers used the telephone or fax machine to send orders to the independent vendor that provides electronic keys for Lexus vehicles—methods of communication that often resulted in incomplete or incorrect information. Today, dealers enter orders for new keys directly into Dealer Daily, which checks that the data is accurate and complete before electronically presenting the order to the vendor for fulfillment. Vendors receive orders within seconds of submission, cutting hours and sometimes days off the process.

Dealership personnel see three primary areas on the Dealer Daily portal: an information area, with

documents and content that can be customized by each TMS regional office (see Figure 1); a message board for TMS to notify dealers of incentive programs, service bulletins, and other topics; and more than 120 business applications. Toyota hosts most of those applications on its own—functionality that ranges from sales reporting to downloading software for reprogramming a vehicle’s on-board computers. Other applications, such as customer satisfaction surveys, are hosted by third-party providers. Regardless of where applications are hosted, users enjoy seamless access and can move among them without regard to the underlying technical infrastructure.

“Dealer Daily provides our dealers with a single point of entry for all the business that they do with Toyota,” says Goltara. “That might seem like the way it should always have been, but it wasn’t. Now it is, and Toyota, our dealers, and our customers are all reaping the benefits. Our Windows Server System–based solution is a key enabler for growth in both revenues and profits.”

Content on Dealer Daily is easily managed by TMS employees located at the company’s headquarters and in regional offices using a Web-based editing interface that is hosted directly on the portal. Built-in workflow and approval tools ensure that newly modified content is approved at the proper level before it is propagated to the live portal. Documents and other files also can be

“Dealer Daily’s inherent efficiency is projected to save TMS and its dealers millions of dollars over the next five years, generously outpacing initial expectations.”Barbra Cooper, Group Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Toyota Motor Sales USA

uploaded to Dealer Daily and hosted on the portal, enabling TMS to deliver new training and sales collateral in a matter of minutes—without the delay and expense of shipping boxes of printed materials to each of 1,200 dealerships.

Today, Dealer Daily is used by more than 35,000 dealership personnel, who generate roughly 6 million page views per day. However, the same physical solution also serves two other user groups. Associates at TMS headquarters use a separate Web interface hosted on Dealer Daily to support internal business processes, such as approving parts claims that are submitted by dealers. Third-party vendors interact with dealerships and process the orders that are submitted through a third Web interface hosted on the portal.

Kaizen: A Process of Continual ImprovementLike all aspects of Toyota’s business, the evolution of Dealer Daily from its inception to its current form is an example of kaizen—a Japanese word for a work process and ethic that involves the continuous search for improvement and the constant implementation of measures to realize incremental improvements. At Toyota, kaizen often involves teams of employees who work together to revise standards and business processes, driving continual improvements in efficiency, quality, and working conditions.

Dealer Daily was initially deployed in 2000, at which time it supported only Toyota dealers and ran on the Microsoft Windows NT® Server operating system version 4.0, Internet Information Server version 4.0, SNA Server version 3.0, and Microsoft SQL ServerTM version 6.5. System-to-system integration with dealer management systems was added a short time later, in the summer of 2001. By then, TMS had a solid infrastructure upon which to continue building and had developed 60–70 percent of the system’s present-day functionality. But TMS still saw room for improvement—and an opportunity to apply the principles of kaizen.

Integrated Management Tools One such opportunity was in the area of supportability and manageability. By the end of 2001, TMS had rolled out Dealer Daily to approximately 250 of its 1,000 Toyota dealers. “Dealer Daily was a solid application initially but began experiencing scalability issues as the rollout progressed and the system’s workload continued to increase,” says Zack Hicks, who at the time was the National Manager for E-Business at Toyota Motor Sales. “To minimize the potential impact of downtime on dealers, we dedicated three operations staff members and four developers—10 percent of our workgroup—to continuously monitoring the system. Additional resources were assigned from 6:00 A.M to 10:00 P.M. at month-end, which is when Dealer Daily experiences its heaviest usage.”

TMS reduced the effort required to support Dealer Daily by deploying Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2000, which exposes all components of the solution to highly refined levels of continuous monitoring and continually checks the health of all server hardware, operating system services, and applications. Upon detecting any abnormal behavior, configurable processing rules built into MOM notify the appropriate personnel by e-mail or pager and determine which, if any, automated responses to execute. Information from the Microsoft Knowledge Base is appended to many MOM alerts, providing TMS IT professionals with the information that they need to rapidly understand what is happening and implement the appropriate corrective actions.

“Microsoft Operations Manager integrated seamlessly with the other Windows Server System components,” says Mylene Mayers, Manager of Dealer Daily Development at the time. “It added an entire new layer of management capabilities to Dealer Daily, enabling us to focus our attention on exploiting the integrated capabilities of Windows Server System instead of baby-sitting our production environment.”

Today, no IT resources are dedicated to monitoring Dealer Daily. Instead, development and operations personnel are free to focus on other tasks that add value to dealers and TMS. MOM monitors Dealer Daily at both the infrastructure and

application levels, checking everything from the health of hard disks and the percentage of server processor utilization to the speed at which Dealer Daily transactions are processed. Alerts for infrastructure-related issues flow directly from MOM to members of the operations team, while alerts for application-level issues—such as slow transaction processing by the TMS mainframe or the Oracle-based system—are sent directly to developers or to the appropriate personnel in an external group.

Improved Manageability Frees Resources to Add ValueAccording to Goltara, Dealer Daily costs 25 percent less to run today than it did when the solution was initially deployed—money that he has been able to redirect toward delivering additional value for TMS and its dealerships. Examples of new features and projects that the labor savings provided by MOM have helped to finance include the addition of functionality to support Lexus dealerships, a reporting tool that enables the Lexus division to improve its loaner vehicle program, tools for certifying used vehicles, hundreds of dealer-requested enhancements, and a usability study to determine how to further enhance Dealer Daily and improve the productivity of its 35,000-plus users. Some of the cost savings were used to migrate Dealer Daily to the Microsoft Windows® 2000 Server operating system with Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.0 and SQL Server 2000—key upgrades that have

“Our software development team is 50 percent smaller than it was two years ago, but with Windows Server System we’re delivering 50 percent more new features per release.”Mylene Mayers, former Manager of Dealer Daily Development, Toyota

further improved solution scalability and performance. In fact, TMS is supporting all 1,200 Toyota and Lexus dealers using the very same physical hardware that in the past had exhibited performance and scalability issues with a 250-dealer workload.

“Before deploying Microsoft Operations Manager, there was a lot of tension and frustration in the air,” says Mayers. “We were always reacting to problems and nobody could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Today, we’re ahead of the curve—we can identify and resolve potential issues before they turn into major problems. Developers feel really good because they’re delivering hundreds of enhancements every quarter instead of spending their time baby-sitting the system. Our software development team is 50 percent smaller than it was two years ago, but with Windows Server System we’re delivering 50 percent more new features per release.”

TMS’s experience with the management capabilities in Windows Server System has been so positive and cost-effective that MOM is now a de facto standard for all new IT projects based on the Windows ServerTM operating system. In addition to Dealer Daily, TMS uses MOM to monitor most Windows Server System–based solutions that are deployed on its corporate campus: some 80 servers running the Active Directory® service, 20 SQL Server database servers, and various Web servers and application servers

running Microsoft BizTalk® Server. The entire MOM infrastructure is managed by two system administrators, whose combined time devoted to the system is approximately 30 hours per week. “Microsoft Operations Manager is an IT standard within our architecture and infrastructure groups,” says Mayers. “It significantly increases the value of solutions built on Windows Server System because it makes those solutions easy to manage as well as easy to build. We can apply MOM to any Windows Server System–based solution without having to worry about it affecting the functionality or performance of the solution.”

Future DirectionsWith Dealer Daily now deployed to all 1,200 Toyota and Lexus dealerships and with the tools in place to efficiently manage the solution, Goltara’s group remains focused on applying the principles of kaizen to extract new value from its investment in Windows Server System. To that end, the organization is planning to upgrade additional Windows Server System components to newer versions, such as Microsoft Host Integration Server 2000. In addition, the group is performing an informal evaluation of Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6.0—a potential upgrade that could deliver even greater levels of security, reliability, scalability, and system performance. The organization also is examining how it can take advantage of the native support that Windows Server System

provides for Web services—application components that can be programmatically accessed over the Internet using standard Web protocols such as XML and SOAP.

“Consortiums of auto manufacturers are pushing toward Web services, and we’re interested in how we can apply them to integrate with our customers and suppliers even more seamlessly,” says Goltara. “Regardless of the specific approach we choose, all the applications that we’re building to streamline our supply chain are being delivered through Dealer Daily. The breadth and depth of capabilities provided by Windows Server System products provide a software infrastructure that can be used to enhance our operations and boost our agility in seemingly limitless ways.”

BenefitsBy building Dealer Daily on Windows Server System, Toyota Motor Sales is delivering predictable service levels and a wealth of value-added and cost-saving functionality to its 1,200 dealers. At the same time, TMS is cutting its own costs and stretching its IT dollars further, channeling a greater part of those funds into delivering new value instead of just keeping its infrastructure up and running. Over the next five years, Dealer Daily will deliver an annualized return on investment of 30 percent for TMS and its dealers.

“Six years ago, Dealer Daily was an ambitious vision and huge technological leap forward for TMS,”

says Barbra Cooper, Group Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Toyota Motor Sales. “Thanks to our alliance with Microsoft and the commitment, diligence, and team spirit of TMS associates across the organization, we have successfully built and delivered a state-of-the-art dealer communication system. Dealer Daily’s inherent efficiency is projected to save TMS and its dealers millions of dollars over the next five years, generously outpacing initial expectations. Moving forward, Dealer Daily’s flexible platform will support the business initiatives and applications needed by dealers to achieve our aggressive sales targets and goals for growth in units-in-operation.”

Ease of ManagementBy taking advantage of the management capabilities provided by Windows Server System and the ease with which those capabilities integrate with other server functionality, TMS reduced the cost to manage Dealer Daily by 25 percent. “We’ve made incredible progress in the area of system management in the past few years,” says Goltara. “Today, we don’t wait for dealers to report problems like slow system performance. The management tools provided in Windows Server System help alert us of any issues and in many cases resolve those issues before they can tangibly affect the customer. We can respond better to issues that might come up, but, even more, we just don’t have as many problems. From where I sit, things are

“The breadth and depth of capabilities provided by Windows Server System products provide a software infrastructure that can be used to enhance our operations and boost our agility in seemingly limitless ways.”

far better today—I can feel it in my gut and can see it on the faces of team members. In addition, I can see it in the numbers. With Windows Server System, the ratio of what I invest to deliver additional value to my customers versus what I spend just keeping the system running is significantly greater than what it was two years ago.”

Dealer Productivity and Cost SavingsThe enhanced productivity provided by integration between Dealer Daily and dealer management systems will save dealerships hundreds of millions of dollars in labor costs over the next five years—savings that result from eliminating the need to rekey information into several systems, better error handling and validation of entered data, and tools that help to automate common business processes. For example, improved efficiency in processing warranty claims, parts ordering, and certification of used vehicles will each generate millions of dollars in savings per year. Dealerships can redirect the time saved toward revenue-generating tasks like prospecting new sales leads and serving customers. In addition to the millions of dollars in productivity savings that Dealer Daily will deliver, its ability to let dealerships swap vehicles prior to delivery will save dealerships several more million dollars in logistics costs over the next five years.

“We commissioned a survey of 3,000 dealership personnel. According to

that outside survey, Dealer Daily saves the average dealership employee 1.8 hours per day,” says Hicks. “For example, it reduces the time required to process a warranty claim by 80 percent, with 93 percent of the required data pulled in automatically. Vendors of leading dealer management systems are telling us that the level of integration provided by Dealer Daily has raised the bar for the entire industry.”

Corporate Cost SavingsDealer Daily will save TMS tens of millions of dollars over the next five years by automating processes that were completed manually in the past. Additionally, the solution will save TMS several million dollars per year in materials and distribution costs by eliminating the need to print and ship sales and training collateral to each of the company’s 1,200 dealerships on a regular basis. Instead, those same materials are simply uploaded to the portal in electronic format for dealerships to download and print. Dealer Daily also will save money for organizations such as Toyota Financial Services. For example, ensuring that credit applications are filled out correctly the first time will save that organization several million dollars per year.

Improved IT AgilityThe centralized, Web-based solution also reduces the cost of system maintenance and software upgrades, which are now done without dealer involvement and for a small fraction of the more than 1 million dollars that

“With Windows Server system, the ratio of what I invest to deliver additional value to my customers versus what I spend just keeping the system running is significantly greater than what it was two years ago.”Ken Goltara, Vice President of

a single upgrade used to cost in the past. “On our minicomputer platform, software upgrades were primarily driven by costs and logistical issues,” says Goltara. “Today, we have the capability and flexibility to allow business requirements to drive the frequency of upgrades. New functionality releases are scheduled on a regular, quarterly basis, but we can deploy new software immediately should business needs demand it.”

An Engine for Future GrowthBeyond major savings, Dealer Daily provides Toyota Motor Sales with an engine that can help fuel its future growth and agility. By fully exploiting the capabilities provided by Windows Server System, TMS is able to do more with its existing resources, continually practicing the principles of kaizen to further reduce costs and drive new revenues for both TMS and its nationwide dealer network. “Dealer Daily takes the attention of dealership personnel away from technology and lets them focus on their customers,” says Hicks. “And in a way, Windows Server System does the same thing for us by letting us focus on meeting the needs of our customers—the dealerships—with minimal distractions from non-value-added tasks like day-to-day system management. The return on investment for Dealer Daily is greater than anticipated, and its total cost of ownership is right on target.”

“Microsoft’s commitment to integrated innovation is very true and well respected by Toyota,” adds

Mayers. “We’re able to focus on building value because we know that all parts of Windows Server System will work together seamlessly and will integrate well with our legacy systems. And we can sleep well at night knowing that solutions based on Windows Server System will be as easy to manage as they are to build.”

ArchitectureDealer Daily’s current architecture, which is illustrated in Figure 2, is based on Windows Server System—server infrastructure software that helps to simplify solution development, deployment, and management so that IT professionals can spend more time adding value to the business. Because all components of Windows Server System are based on a common technology platform and architecture, the unique capabilities that each provides can be rapidly combined using a single toolset and programming framework, enabling fast time-to-market for solutions that are tailored to business needs and can be easily managed with a single operations framework and skill set.

Key server software products that play a role in Dealer Daily include Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server, SNA Server 3.0, Site Server 3.0, SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition, and Microsoft Operations Manager 2000. All parts of the solution were developed using the Microsoft Visual Studio® development system version 6.0.

“Dealer Daily takes the attention of dealership personnel away from technology and lets them focus on their customers.”Zack Hicks, former National Manager for E-Business, Toyota Motor Sales USA

Presentation TierThe Web tier of Dealer Daily consists of 10 Dell 6450 four-processor servers running Windows 2000 Server with IIS 5.0. Of those Web servers, 6 support dealership personnel, 2 support third-party suppliers, and another 2 support TMS associates. All three Web server farms are load-balanced using a Cisco Local Director, which distributes the workload evenly over all servers in a farm and prevents any single point of failure from compromising service availability.

The Dealer Daily user interface is implemented as Active Server Pages (ASP) using dynamic HTML, Microsoft

Visual Basic® Scripting Edition, and JavaScript. Users access the system using Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01 or above. “We decided to build the application for Microsoft Internet Explorer to provide a rich user experience,” says Goltara. “Features like advanced validation, wizards, sorting, and pick lists were added to allow users at the dealership to create orders and claims faster and with fewer errors.”

Much of Dealer Daily’s business logic also runs on the Web servers—that is, all but the logic that processes dealer management system transactions, which runs on a separate pair of

Loca

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Figure 2: Dealer Daily is based on a scalable, extensible, multitier architecture.

application servers. All business logic components are written in the Visual Basic development system or C++ and run in the COM+ environment.

Dealer Management System and Host InterfacesDealer management systems send text files that contain transaction data to Dealer Daily over a virtual private network using File Transfer Protocol (FTP). Those files are received by two Dell 6450 four-processor servers running Windows 2000 Server and IIS 5.0—specifically, the IIS 5.0 FTP service. From the FTP servers, the files containing transaction data are passed to a pair of two Dell 6450 four-processor application servers running Windows 2000 Server, which use COM+ components to parse the files received by the FTP servers and call the appropriate back-end systems for processing.

Transactions against the TMS mainframe are invoked using the Component Object Model Transaction Integrator (COMTI) and the Host Integration Server 2000 client, while transactions against the Oracle-based financial system are done through an Oracle client. Integration with the mainframe is handled by a pool of three Dell 6450 four-processor servers running Windows 2000 Server and SNA Server 3.0. (Toyota plans to upgrade to Host Integration Server 2000 soon.) By using SNA Server, TMS was able to extend the mainframe’s capabilities to provide access through Dealer Daily while leaving the host system’s processing logic unchanged.

The SNA pool also can be called directly by the Web servers, which is required by transactions in which data is input directly through the Dealer Daily user interface instead of through a dealer management system.

DatabaseThe operational and reporting data stores for Dealer Daily reside on two Dell 8450 eight-processor servers running Windows 2000 Advanced Server with Internet Information Services 5.0 and SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition. To maximize database availability, the two database servers are configured into an active-active cluster using Windows Clustering. Every night, 40–50 flat files containing parts master data, vehicle inventory, lookup tables, sales reports, and other types of information are downloaded to the database cluster from the mainframe using FTP. Then the database cluster uses SQL Server Data Transformation Services (DTS) to parse those files and load the information that they contain into the appropriate SQL Server database tables.

“We chose SQL Server because it met our requirement for processing the 200,000–250,000 transactions we see per day, as well as providing high availability and failover capabilities,” says Goltara. “Like all components of Windows Server System, SQL Server delivers the full, industrial-strength performance that we need to fuel our continued growth.”

“Microsoft Operations Manager is an IT standard within our architecture and infrastructure groups.”Mylene Mayers, former Manager of Dealer Daily Development, Toyota Motor Sales USA

Management and Monitoring EnvironmentDealer Daily is monitored by a single Dell 2450 two-processor server running Windows 2000 Server and Microsoft Operations Manager 2000, which uses another Dell 2450 two-processor server running Windows 2000 Server and SQL Server 2000 as its data store. To monitor system health, MOM relies on intelligent agents that are automatically pushed out to each server. Those agents continuously collect data based on configurable processing rules, such as a server’s processor utilization or the size of a queue. Data from each monitored server is fed to the server running MOM, which continually evaluates the information and relies on configurable processing rules to determine trigger levels for each parameter being monitored. Processing rules also determine which actions are implemented upon an alert being triggered and can include executing an automated script that stops and restarts a service. MOM also can be configured to take progressively stronger actions if a problem continues for a predetermined length of time.

TMS augmented the capabilities provided in the MOM Base Management Pack—which is used to monitor many basic operating system services, including IIS 5.0—with additional capabilities that are provided by an application management pack for SQL Server and a hardware management pack provided by Dell. TMS has found that

it uses about 200 of the 13,000 processing rules that are provided with MOM. Dealer Daily is instrumented at the application level through the use of scripts that write entries into the event log—entries that are picked up by the MOM agents and sent back to the MOM server for processing. “We have an understanding with the operations team in that event log entries that begin with a certain prefix are automatically picked up by MOM and processed, with alerts sent to the development team by e-mail or pager,” says Mayers. “With that mechanism in place, we can instrument Dealer Daily in new ways with minimal involvement from the operations team. Every release, we add instrumentation to monitor for something new.”

The TMS campus infrastructure is monitored by a separate Dell 2450 two-processor server running Windows 2000 Server and MOM 2000, which uses a cluster of two Dell 6450 four-processor servers running Windows 2000 Advanced Server and SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition as its data store. In addition to the MOM Base Management Pack, the system that monitors the TMS corporate infrastructure uses the SQL Server Application Management Pack and the Active Directory Application Management Pack. Instrumenting a new Windows Server System–based solution to take advantage of MOM takes about a week, including the time it takes to write any custom scripts, test the application, set up

any processing rules, and specify which parties are to be notified when an event is triggered.

Microsoft Windows Server SystemMicrosoft Windows Server System is a comprehensive, integrated, and interoperable server infrastructure that helps reduce the complexity and costs of building, deploying, connecting, and operating agile business solutions. Windows Server System helps customers create new value for their business through the strategic use of their IT assets. With the Windows Server operating system as its foundation, Windows Server System delivers dependable infrastructure for data management and analysis; enterprise integration; customer, partner, and employee portals; business process automation; communications and collaboration; and core IT operations including security, deployment, and systems management. For more information about Windows Server System, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/ windowsserversystem /

Manageability and Microsoft's Dynamic Systems InitiativeImproving the manageability of solutions built on Windows Server

For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/

For more information about Toyota Motor Sales USA products and services, visit the website at: http://www.toyota.com/

© 2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, Active Directory, BizTalk, Visual Basic, Visual Studio, Windows, the Windows logo, Windows NT, Windows Server, and Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Document published February 2004

Software and Services Microsoft Windows Server System:

− Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Windows 2000 Server, with Internet Information Services

− Operations Manager 2000− SNA Server− SQL Server 2000

Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 Microsoft Consulting Services

(MCS)

Hardware 2 Dell 2450 two-processor servers 15 Dell 6450 four-processor servers 2 Dell 8450 eight-processor servers

System is a key driver behind the Microsoft Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI).  DSI is a Microsoft-led industry initiative aimed at dramatically simplifying and automating how businesses design, deploy and operate IT systems. DSI focuses on driving operational requirements back into IT systems at design time and creating a connection that flows from design, to operations, to the end users utilizing a system. Dynamic Systems are composed of applications that self describe their operational characteristics, operating systems that automatically respond to changing business needs and adjust data center resources accordingly, and management solutions that automate administration tasks and allow business policy to drive IT.  The end result to your business is dramatically decreased operating costs, improved reliability, and increased responsiveness across the entire IT life cycle.

The Microsoft strategy for delivering on DSI combines a long-term vision with a solid set of near-term product offerings that enable customers to take practical steps toward that vision today.  Windows Server System products including Windows Server 2003, Systems Management Server 2003 and the soon to arrive Microsoft Operations Manager 2004 are great ways to get on the DSI roadmap today. To learn more about DSI, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/dsi/