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Industry: Automotive
Deployment Country: Australia
Solution: Increase business efficiency with partners by opening up B2B communicationchannels across national car dealer network
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We have found Vordel's products to be second to none in their abilities to deliver on our requirements and they have become an integral part of the Mazda Australia architecture
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Tim Ballingall,
National Information Systems Manager,
Mazda Australia
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Press Release:
Mazda press release
Introduction:
Mazda Australia is a subsidiary of Mazda Motor Corporation and boasts an extensive dealer network of over 125 dealerships across Australia accounting for 7.8 percent of the Australian car market. The company has over 160 staff with a further 2,000+ employed in the dealer network. Mazda Australia's Information Systems Department provides all IT services for Mazda Australia's corporate offices. IT services are also provided to Mazda Motors New Zealand and their 23 dealerships.
Business Objective:
Mazda Australia needed to open up B2B communication channels, predominantly with its dealers, but also various business partners as well. The aim for implementing B2B communications was to improve business efficiency at dealerships and head office by reducing the double keying of information and provide streamlined access to multiple sources of information via one interface.
The information exchanged relates to vehicle sales, reservations, model and pricing information to ensure that Mazda and dealer systems are always complete and up to date. It also will aggregate data from multiple systems within Mazda and provide a single interface to detailed information on the most up to date vehicle, warranty, service and customer information.
Business Challenge:
The motor industry in Australia is a very competitive environment and Mazda wanted to maintain its competitive advantage by improving and strengthening its dealer-centric business model. Mazda needed to implement a partner focused solution that would facilitate easy access to its B2B system and deliver the attendant business efficiencies , without posing any constraints due to the requirements of Mazda's own internal systems.
Budget was also an issue, and Mazda needed to ensure it bought into an economical and flexible solution that would scale with its own internal software and hardware platform infrastructure policies, as well as those of its partners.
Technical Challenge:
Mazda had for some time made a commitment to adopting open standards as the fastest and most pragmatic approach to enabling integration with disparate, heterogeneous systems, and consequently, SOA was the logical choice for real time exchanges. Mazda required a standards-based solution to manage security at the message level (XML encryption, WS-Security, SAML etc.) and to do so in a way that seamlessly integrates with third party tools and partners implementations of the same standards.
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Vordel's Gateway solution as providing the optimum levels of deployment flexibility combined with the most mature product set on the market to address our requirements.
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Tim Ballingall,
National Information Systems Manager,
Mazda Australia
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Mazda also wanted to roll out the system with minimum impact or alteration to existing business processes and mission critical IT infrastructure based around Sun Solaris servers. It was essential that this stability was maintained for a crucial piece of infrastructure like a Gateway. For this reason, Mazda selected a software-based solution that offered mature product set with an intuitive administrative interface to permit rapid roll out with minimal retraining of IT staff.
Benefits/Results:
Vordel's solution has enabled Mazda to roll out their SOA with minimum requirement for adjustments to systems or alterations to existing processes. The benefit to Mazda staff & dealers is that people will do most of their work on one integrated system resulting in improved speed, efficiency, auditability, transparency of process etc.
In a competitive market this has made for quick uptake by the dealership community, eager to avail of the immediate efficiencies and cost savings offered by the Mazda B2B implementation.
The gateway can be setup & running to testing level within an hour or so. With all schemas and policies defined an actual production interface can be commissioned in a very short period of time.
High level architecture diagram - Click to enlarge
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