Published on 31-Jul-2009
"Neocol has demonstrated excellent responsiveness in providing ongoing support of the IBM Content Collector for Email system. We feel sure that our future requirements will also be met to fill our internal skills gap, hence we have committed to awarding a three-year support contract to them. We look forward to their assisting us with managing our message archiving capacity requirements." - Hemant Sohoni, Collaboration Tools Team Leader, Toyota Financial Services
Customer:
Toyota Financial Services
Industry:
Automotive, Financial Markets
Deployment country:
United Kingdom
Solution:
Enterprise Content Management
IBM Business Partner:
Neocol
Overview
Toyota Financial Services gains immediate access to critical information for auditing and compliance requirements when IBM Business Partner Neocol implements an IBM eDiscovery and e-mail solution.
Business need:
Search and retrieve e-mail communications in a timely manner as part of any audit trail or legal discovery motion
Solution:
An eDiscovery and e-mail archiving solution that helps staff meet auditing requirements for Sarbanes-Oxely and U.K.’s Financial Services Authority regulations while dramatically improving e-mail performance
Benefits:
50% reduction in live e-mail storage; removed potential financial risk from non-compliance; enabled rapid search and retrieval of e-mails
Case Study
Toyota Financial Services is a leading provider of automotive financial services, offering an extensive line of financing plans and vehicle and payment protection products to Toyota customers and dealers throughout the world. The Toyota Financial Services worldwide brand identity was launched in December 1999 and acts as an umbrella brand name used to market the products of Toyota Motor Credit Corporation (TMCC) and Toyota Motor Insurance Services, Inc. Toyota Financial Services (UK) PLC (TFS) is the captive automotive finance house for Toyota and Lexus in the UK.
Over the last decade, TFS has benefitted from the tremendous growth in the Toyota Motor Sales brand, which has seen its worldwide sales increase to a point where it has become the number one car and truck supplier in the world. This has delivered a reciprocal growth in their financial services sector.
Since opening its doors in 1999, TFS has grown from a small company with eight associates to one that currently employs approximately 3,000 associates nationwide with managed assets in excess of $65 billion.
New legal and corporate compliance complications
In recent years the finance and insurance industry has experienced tighter regulatory controls – notably SOX legislation (Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002). All transactions are now governed by stringent rules, and subject to checks and balances to help ensure authenticity and legal compliance.
E-mail communications are now deemed to be bona fide legal documents, and as such companies are obliged to retain them for a period of seven years.
TFS realized that they must be able to search and retrieve this information in a timely manner as part of any audit trail or legal discovery motion or face possible legal consequences, so they contacted Neocol whose expert guidance and best practices were ideally suited complete a project of this complexity.
Secure archival of emails with fast search and retrieval
TFS had three major business challenges that needed addressing.
- They had to ensure that all systems were Sarbanes-Oxley compliant and that they met the U.K.’s Financial Services Authority (FSA) regulations.
- They needed to dramatically reduce rapidly increasing storage costs.
- They had to easily find e-mails to support litigation cases and provide supporting communication to the HR team quickly and efficiently.
As well as the non-compliance risk to the business, TFS was spending excessive amounts on storage for their primary e-mail server. This accounted for 70 to 80 percent of the used space and spanned many individual and fragmented servers. Urgent and dramatic action was required.
With no e-mail archiving TFS had a huge liability as e-mails were often lost or deleted by staff creating the possibility of a critical legal liability.
In addition, it was difficult for staff to search and easily find correspondence. After deploying the e-mail archiving and eDiscovery solution TFS realized instantaneous benefits by having immediate access to critical information. They were also able to quickly respond to the dynamic demands of their employees, customers, partners, suppliers and legal requests.
A stringent evaluation process
TFS conducted, and shared, a stringent evaluation process whereby they reviewed the short and long term business requirements and capabilities.
Neocol then worked with key personnel at TFS to implement the system which would help meet all the business requirements that were driving the project – most importantly SOX and FSA compliance. Additionally, with the escalating operational costs that TFS wanted to reduce, Neocol were able to implement IBM® eDiscovery and archiving solution that would satisfy all the key project requirements.
Neocol used their experience with many other similar deployments and showed the Toyota team how other leading organizations met and complied with such stringent regulation.
Potential financial risk removed
The IBM eDiscovery solution delivered to TFS an integrated, on demand e-mail storage and retrieval system that helped to address their legal compliance needs: Benefits included:
- Daily archiving of e-mails and attachments
- Live e-mail storage reduced by 50 percent
- Over 1.3 million e-mails archived
- eDiscovery ready with all e-mails indexed for rapid search and retrieval capabilities
- Deep compression and storage functionality dramatically reduces storage space
- Export .nsf files for further analysis, legal review and forensics
Using IBM’s eDiscovery solution, TFS are better able to comply with their legal responsibilities and have minimized any critical business impact from legal non-compliance. Neocol’s implementation has removed the potential financial risk and dramatically enhanced e-mail performance and reduced storage costs.
For more information
Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner. Visit us at:
ibm.com/software/ecm
You can get even more out of Information Management software by participating in independently run Information Management User Groups around the world. Learn about opportunities near you at: ibm.com/software/data/usergroup
For more information on Neocol, visit:
www.neocol.com
For more information on Toyota Financial Services, visit:
www.toyotafinancial.com
Additionally, IBM Global Financing can tailor financing solutions to your specific IT needs. For more information on great rates, flexible payment plans and loans,
and asset buyback and disposal, visit:
ibm.com/financing
Products and services used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.
Software:
Content Manager, Content Collector for Email, eDiscovery Manager
Legal Information
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2009 IBM Corporation Software Group Route 100 Somers, NY 10589 U.S.A. Produced in the United States of America July 2009 All Rights Reserved IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, Domino, Lotus and Lotus Notes are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. If these and other IBM trademarked terms are marked on their first occurrence in this information with a trademark symbol (® or ™), these symbols indicate U.S. registered or common law trademarks owned by IBM at the time this information was published. Such trademarks may also be registered or common law trademarks in other countries. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Web at “Copyright and trademark information” at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml Other company, product or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. This case study is an example of how one customer uses IBM products. There is no guarantee of comparable results. References in this publication to IBM products and services do not imply that IBM intends to make them available in all countries in which IBM operates. Any material included in this document with regard to third parties is based on information obtained from such parties. No effort has been made to independently verify the accuracy of the information. This document does not constitute an expressed or implied recommendation or endorsement by IBM of any third-party product or service.