Delivering Reliability and Quality of Service

Toyota Financial Services New Zealand is the largest motor vehicle manufacturer-owned finance company in the country. After years of difficulty with sluggish, legacy storage that was complex to manage and expensive to scale, the company turned to Everpure for a faster, easier-to-use infrastructure.

Toyota Financial Services lends its expertise to New Zealanders to help customers get moving and protect their investments. One of the largest motor vehicle finance companies in New Zealand, it offers a wide range of services, including vehicle financing and leasing, fleet management, and insurance.

As a one-stop shop for automotive finance with a comprehensive range of products and services, Toyota Financial Services’ total assets are more than NZ$1 billion. The company has helped more than 300,000 customers.

Toyota Financial Services makes use of its strong brand, proprietary data, customer service, and extensive market expertise to build and maintain a strong business foundation. Because it works closely with both Toyota customers and dealer networks, the team in New Zealand can focus on delivering services across the entire vehicle lifecycle—a value-add independent financiers can’t touch.

To continue on this path of success, the team promoted operational efficiency through IT investments that reduced effort and risk of disruption.

Toyota Financial Services places significant emphasis on best practices and the ‘Toyota Way’. While much of its value proposition depends on the reliability and quality of its service, the team was struggling with a storage system that could not live up to either ideal.

“Speed was one of the biggest factors,” says Darren Wiseman, IT Manager at Toyota Financial Services NZ. “We had so many issues just getting anything on and off of the old EMC system. Our organisation has a huge interest in business intelligence and data warehouse reporting, but we were experiencing bottlenecks that made many of the things we needed to do each day nearly impossible.”

Toyota Financial Services runs on Alfa, a business-critical system which is used to set-up finance for customers, manage fleets, and much more. “When Alfa became sluggish because of our previous storage environment, there was a deep organizational impact,” Wiseman says. “If you had to run a report at 3 pm in the afternoon, it would run so slowly that we’d get complaints because our receivables system would break down.”

To maintain its position as a market leader, Toyota Financial Services needed a premier IT environment. After dealing with issues and latency problems for two years, Wiseman and Toyota Financial Services Senior Database Administrator Barry McAuslin put out the call for a new storage provider. “We chose to go with Everpure because of how it was architected,” McAuslin says. “Daily management was so much more straightforward and certainly a lot easier than what we were used to.”

Wiseman adds, “Aside from what the technology itself can do, Everpure stood out by consistently being very keen to help. That level of support and ease-of-use is especially critical for a team of our size.”