Case study: End of BMC sponsorship a blessing for Toyota Motorsport IT
Toyota Motorsport went to the market for a new ITSM system when a sponsorship deal with BMC came to an end, and has been reaping the benefits ever since
Toyota Motorsport went to the market for a new IT service management (ITSM) system when a sponsorship deal with BMC came to an end, and has been reaping the benefits ever since.
In 2003, Toyota Motorsport, which is the part of Toyota that provides cars and support to race car teams, took on its first ITSM system.
Per Nordqvist, service delivery manager at Toyota Motorsport, says when he joined the company in 2001, IT was chaotic and there was no system to handle service requests or record IT assets.
The company has 300 users that are mainly based in one location. “We only used email, and a lot of calls were missed,” he says.
At the time, BMC Software, which has ITSM products, was a Toyota Motorsport team sponsor, and an agreement was reached for the team to use BMC’s Remedy ITSM for free.
Reaping the benefits of Supportworks ITSM
Four years later, the sponsorship deal came to an end, as did the free software, and Toyota Motorsport did not hesitate to find an alternative.
“We went to market because we were not happy with the BMC Remedy system,” says Nordqvist.
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Within six weeks of going to market, Toyota was up and running with Hornbill’s Supportworks ITSM.
Nordqvist says one of the attractions of Supportworks was the customisation tools, which were simple to use.
“If, for example, you are used to Microsoft Office, Supportworks is easy to use. It is intuitive and easy to learn,” he says.
Advantages of on-premise IT service management
The ability to customise is one of the reasons Toyota Motorsport opted for an on-premise system rather than one that was web-based. “With web-based software there were limitations to customisation,” says Nordqvist.
He says the Supportworks system has been in place since 2008, and when it was upgraded a real advantage was revealed: “When we upgraded to the BMC Remedy system, it took four months and required two external consultants. When we upgraded to Supportworks, I did it myself in two weeks.”
The new ITSM system has also helped the company manage its IT assets better.
“Before, we had no idea what we had, which made inventory very hard,” says Nordqvist. The company would only be able to account for 80% of its IT assets and would lose 20%.
Supportworks records assets, and now about 99% of assets are recorded.
