The IT department and business units at Toyota Motor paint a picture of cooperation when it comes to collaborating on business intelligence. Following last year's huge product recall, the company deployed a Product Quality Analytics system, which was developed by the IT group for use by Toyota's quality engineers, reports Jaikumar Vijayan at ComputerWorld.

The analytics system gathers and presents data from numerous units across the company, including customer call centers, warranty claims, service centers and the vehicle configuration system unit. Engineers can look through six years' worth of data at once, filtering and visualizing it in multiple ways.

It is not uncommon these days for the IT department to be more involved in providing data for a BI system than in building it, Vijayan reports. In the case of Toyota's Product Quality Analytics system, however, IT played an integral role in developing the system. Software from Endeca allowed the department to deploy the system faster than it could otherwise. With the Endeca technology, quality engineers can draw from multiple data sources to search for and analyze information quickly and easily.

For more:
- see Jaikumar Vijayan's article at Computerworld

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