Toyota Motors

Toyota Motors has now surpassed General Motors as the largest supplier of cars and trucks in the world, many of which are produced in Toyota’s 16 North American manufacturing plants. With over 1,700 dealers in North America selling over 2.5 million vehicles annually, Toyota Motors has a huge challenge in dealing with the logistics required to move their products to market.

Equitable Distribution of Cars among Toyota Dealers

Syncata, a California-based company specializing in business consulting and software development for the automotive industry, contracted with Innovative Scheduling to develop a software solution that assisted managers at Toyota Motors to assign vehicles to various dealerships, especially when a certain vehicle type is in high demand, and there is not enough supply to meet all of the orders. Any shortages must be allocated in more or less the same proportion across all Toyota dealers. Innovative Scheduling developed a stage-wise approach to solve this problem with a sequence of several integer programming problems. This methodology solved Toyota’s distribution problem within a few minutes of computational time and met all of their practical constraints. Our software has been put into production at Toyota.