Toyota Digital Transformation Case Study: A Long-Term Tech Partnership
Every Toyota digital transformation case study should start with the same question: what business problem needs solving right now? It's not a question about technology, it's about real need. That was true in 2020, when Toyota do Brasil needed to professionalize how it developed people across its dealership network. And it was true again not long after, when the pandemic forced the automaker to rethink how in-person work would function inside its offices. Two completely different needs, two projects built on distinct tech stacks, but the same technology partner behind both solutions.
The partnership between Agence and Toyota do Brasil: from vendor to strategic technology partner
Hiring an IT consultancy for a one-off project is relatively straightforward. The harder challenge is building a relationship that holds up when the underlying business problem changes entirely. That's what happened between Agence and Toyota: what began as an e-learning platform grew, over time, into a strategic technology partnership capable of responding to very different demands.
That recognition comes through clearly in the words of Marco Luvizan, IT Infrastructure Coordinator at Toyota do Brasil:
"Agence represented an evolution, since we started working with the most modern technologies available in the world. This added a lot of value to our business, ensuring scalability and high availability of our applications."
Centro de Treinamento Toyota (CTT): the corporate e-learning platform case study behind the dealership network
The first project came out of a concrete need in the automotive sector: in a competitive market, how well-prepared a sales team is translates directly into results. The dealership network needed a scalable way to standardize knowledge and bring together professionals spread across the country. The answer was Centro de Treinamento Toyota (CTT), a custom corporate e-learning platform that Agence built not only on the technical side, but also helped define the courses, methodology and identity of the whole initiative.
The pedagogical approach favors interaction and proximity, with a focus on maximizing performance inside each dealership and adding value for the end customer. A project like this requires equal command of custom web development and instructional content, which is what makes the CTT platform a good example of technology and pedagogy working in step with each other.
How the CTT works: learning tracks, Moodle, certification and team management
CTT was built as a complete corporate learning environment. Users log in, land on the Home screen, and navigate to the Training area, organized into "My Tracks" and "Knowledge Dimensions." Courses run on top of Moodle (one of the most established e-learning environments in the world, used here as the pedagogical engine behind the user experience), and the journey wraps up with exams and certificate issuance.
- Enrollment: open classes, my enrollments and closed classes
- Team Progress: tracking reports and per-user visibility into learning tracks
- An admin backend to run the entire operation
On the technical side, the platform was built in PHP with a MySQL database, integrated with Moodle, combining pedagogical robustness with the customization Toyota needed for its own network.
e-Access: a hybrid workplace attendance system built with a QR code check-in system for offices
Years later, the business problem was a different one entirely. During the pandemic, according to FGV data, 67.4% of formal workers in Brazil shifted to remote work, and companies started considering smaller offices and hybrid, rotating in-person schedules. Toyota was one of them, and without fixed desks, three problems came up at once: how to find an available desk, how to find a colleague in the building, and how to optimize workstation usage throughout the day.
Agence's answer was e-Access, an attendance and desk-tracking system available in web and mobile versions. A QR code sticker is placed on each desk; employees scan it with their phone, and the system cross-checks the QR code's latitude and longitude against the smartphone's GPS to confirm the person is actually at that spot. It's the same check-in/check-out logic used for training sessions, classes and visitor management, adapted here for hybrid workplace attendance tracking. This is a hot desking software case study in the most literal sense: the system exists specifically to manage desks that no one owns permanently.
A project that depends this heavily on a mobile app and geolocation necessarily involves native app development for iOS and Android, making sure QR code scanning works reliably on any device.
Scalability, availability and results: what both projects say about how Agence works
e-Access delivered concrete gains: optimized workstation usage while keeping occupancy high, an easier way for employees to find their way around the office, and useful statistics to inform future decisions about physical space. On the technical side, the platform is fully web-based, with redundant cloud storage and 99.99% availability, built on Amazon EC2 and S3 (the AWS compute and storage infrastructure behind the operation), split across three independent environments for production, staging and development. It's a cloud scalability AWS EC2 S3 case study as much as it is a workplace management one.
That level of demand for scalability and high cloud availability is only sustainable with well-planned infrastructure, the same kind of structure that backs the system hosting Agence provides to other clients. That same pattern, repeated across two completely different business contexts, is really what this case study is about: not two isolated projects in a portfolio, but a partnership that proves itself with every new challenge, the kind of long-term IT outsourcing relationship that a custom software development partner in the automotive space needs to be able to sustain, whether the demand is an employee training platform for dealership networks or an emergency response to a new way of working.
If your company is evaluating a technology partner that can sustain a relationship over the long run, whether for a defined project like a training platform or an urgent need like adapting to hybrid work, talk to the Agence team and see how the same approach can apply to your context.
