The client said "BFS fully understood the mission critical nature of the application, inasmuch as if the application stopped, then production is immediately affected." The sequence receiving module as developed is now the preferred message receiving module for Toyota in the UK.

TTAS supplies wheel and tyre assemblies to Toyota Motors in Derby.

Utilising their expertise in key technologies, BFS produced a reliable and maintainable ALC system. The Python-based system is designed to be fault-tolerant so that even in the unlikely event of a hardware failure, the remaining software can be run on any system within the environment. Each part of the system has the code to handle any aspect of the process from receiving the core data from Toyota to processing and reporting.

Business Issue

Prior to March 2002, the wheel and tyre assembly for Toyota Motors had been operated in-house at the main production plant at Burnaston in Derbyshire. The process was however, using unreliable equipment and suffered from lack of space. An async connection line went straight to a serial printer, which then printed the sequence request. The system was a very basic, but failsafe system.

A strategic decision was made by Toyota Motors (TMUK) to outsource this aspect of production and a new company Toyota Tsusho Assembly Systems (TTAS) was set up to run the operation (Tsusho means "commerce" in Japanese.) A greenfield site was found at Castle Donington and a new production centre was built incorporating some existing equipment that had been transferred from Burnaston to TTAS.

TTAS was able to use the experience gained by its parent Toyota Tsusho's USA operations after a similar strategic move was implemented there, although ultimately the UK operation chose not to copy the US system. The company had originally planned to use a European supplier but timescales were very short and the critical requirement was for a company that could very quickly understand the requirements and that would be able to deliver against a very short timescale.