Toyota Motor Italia built on its existing experience with Board, already used as the standard financial tool across Toyota Motor Europe, to transform and streamline its key financial operations. By leveraging Board’s integrated Enterprise Planning platform, the company automated processes such as accounting, invoicing, budgeting, and campaign management. This digital transformation shortened the financial close process by 80%, drastically reduced processing times, minimized errors, and enhanced cross-team collaboration—resulting in faster, more accurate financial insights to drive strategic decision-making. Looking ahead, Toyota Motor Italia plans to extend the platform’s use to additional operational areas, further strengthening efficiency and agility across the organization.
Founded in Japan in 1933, Toyota is a global leader in the automotive industry. Through an innovative approach and a customer-centric philosophy, the company often manages to anticipate market needs, pioneering groundbreaking automotive technologies such as hybrid, electric, and hydrogen vehicles.
The Challenge: Digitalizing Financial Operations to improve efficiency
Commitment to continuous improvement, operational excellence, and sustainability has led the company to seek innovative solutions to digitize and automate essential but low value-added processes such as e-mail management, report preparation, meeting preparation, and data entry, in order to reduce workload and avoid risks related to human error.
Within its financial operations, Toyota Motor Italia identified critical areas of improvement such as accounting, invoicing, budget purchasing & payments, and incentive campaign management. These processes involved extensive manual tasks, which hindered timely decision-making and increased the potential for errors and financial risks. Toyota Motor Italia aimed to maximize digitalization and automation, reduce errors, and ensure highly accurate financial insights to better support strategic business decisions.
The Solution: A flexible, scalable Platform that enhances collaboration
To overcome these challenges, Toyota chose Board for several reasons.
- Its comprehensive coverage of finance and operational processes: Board can appropriately cover Toyota’s different business processes, starting from the finance controlling and accounting processes.
- Its scalability and flexibility, which make it possible to create and manage several models and applications within it, in response to changes arising from the market or the Group.
- Its advanced simulation and versioning capabilities that enable users to easily deploy what-if analysis and comparisons between different business scenarios.
- Its multidimensionality, together with drill down and drill through capabilities, enabling the production of tailor-made reports.
We set some goals: maximize efficiency, avoid errors, complete monthly closing in one day instead of four or five, and thus provide accurate financial information
Gianluca Murgia
The Benefits: Improved accuracy, efficiency, and collaboration
The adoption of Board significantly optimized Toyota’s financial operations.
Closing activities that previously required five days now take only one day, greatly minimizing manual intervention and enhancing overall accuracy. Also, Board’s automation of accounting entries significantly reduced financial risks and errors.
The platform enabled smooth integration of the new accounting standard OIC 34, and
fostered greater cross-team collaboration, ensuring that accurate, timely data was consistently available across the organization.
Ultimately, Board’s centralized model greatly improved security and reliability, and allowed faster integration with Toyota Motor Europe’s Board system.
The Future: Expanding Board’s capabilities
Looking ahead, Toyota plans to extend the use of the platform to other business areas, integrating financial activities with sales volume management and the efforts related to CO2 emissions challenges. Further integrations will also cover purchasing activities, treasury automation, and budget monitoring.
