Ford Use of Internet / Intranet Technology

Computer Power Allows Ford To Bridge International Gulfs

Wall Street Journal
Special Technology Section
Pages R14 and R17
November 18, 1996

By OSCAR SURIS

DEARBORN, Mich. -- Guiseppe Delena, a 43-year-old vehicle-design chief working at a Ford Motor Co. studio in Turin, Italy, is about to do in seconds what used to take him hours -- and sometimes days -- to do. He is going to share an idea with his staff in the U.S.

"Do you see this part here?" asks a small, grainy image of the bearded Mr. Delena flickering on a computer monitor here. "We should probably change it. It would allow us to change the edge of this door." Mr. Delena's scribbles on a graphic of a vehicle appear as bright red marks on the computer's 21-inch screen.

"That would make all the difference, actually," says Gary Morales, a 36-year-old design manager in Dearborn who is watching Mr. Delena's trans-Atlantic brainstorm unfold. Another member of Mr. Delena's staff offers his thoughts by touching Mr. Morales's monitor with a stylus, his suggestions showing up on the screen as lime-green streaks.

This impromptu, 100%-interactive staff meeting between Ford designers in Europe and the U.S. would never have happened without the help of two $250,000-plus workstation computers -- one in Italy, another here.

The computers are all part of Ford's drive to bridge geographical gulfs with tools more powerful than electronic mail. Ford is assembling a collection of computing networks through which it hopes to conduct most of its international product-development efforts without the help of travel agents. The goal is to cut vehicle-development time and costs.

There is a broader purpose. Having cut more than 3,000 workers from its product-development ranks, and looking to trim 6,000 more jobs by the end of next year, the No. 2 auto maker is counting on these networks to help it accomplish more with fewer workers.

No More Planes

"We need to get our people off of airplanes -- it's as simple as that," says Paul Blumberg, director of product-development systems for Ford's U.S.-based automotive operations. "If we are going to be global, we are going to need this."

"This," as Mr. Blumberg puts it, is a multibillion-dollar corporate infrastructure that includes hundreds of high-powered computers, including the two Silicon Graphics Inc. workstations used by Mr. Delena and his staff. More are on the car maker's shopping list.

Additionally, Ford's computing setup includes a companywide intranet, or private network that lets the company distribute information internally; a reserve of supercomputers that rivals some of the nation's most influential research labs; dozens of optical-fiber networks; and software that should allow Ford employees to conduct the kind of virtual engineering and design that is needed to shave months from the typical vehicle-development cycle.

Ford's rivals at General Motors Corp. and Chrysler Corp. have also been investing heavily in this kind of equipment. But none of the Big Three has devoted so much attention to the question of achieving international synergies as Ford, where the electron-powered exchanges of information across continents and oceans have been made a top priority.

Global Mind-Set

Structurally, the car maker moved in this direction two years ago when it began its "Ford 2000" reorganization, a cost-focused effort that imposed a global mind-set on the company's product-development activities. No longer would Ford engineers in Europe or anywhere else have a parochial mandate; they would be expected to work with their peers in the U.S. and elsewhere to develop products that could be sold anywhere. Before the restructuring, the international units were mainly concerned with doing business in their respective countries.

A precursor of the new philosophy was Ford's 1993 Mondeo sedan. The result of a much-maligned $6 billion effort, the European-made car nonetheless became the basis a year later for Ford's Contour and Mercury Mystique sedans in the U.S., and should spawn more offshoots for sale outside Europe by the end of the decade.

To pull off more Mondeos, Ford is fostering more of the international communication that is allowing designers like Mr. Delena to expedite and refine product-development decisions on computer screens before they are realized in clay, fiberglass or steel.

The time savings are a major plus. Ford designers can already transmit sophisticated, three-dimensional computer images of vehicle prototypes to the auto maker's studios in Turin, where computers read their designs with exacting precision. Top Ford executives on both continents, after studying these computer-animated previews, give the go-ahead to devise clay models, or full-size versions. The designers' work, now translated into numerical data, is then fed into a machine that etches the computer sketches into clay. Because engineers want to see what a car actually looks like before work begins on an assembly line, clay models remain an essential stage in vehicle development.

No More Redundancy

Ford also hopes powerful information channels will eliminate redundancy within its product-development culture. Because of the sharing of information, a steering wheel designed by the company's engineers in Dunton, England, won't have to be designed again in Dearborn. A fix concocted in the U.S. for a defective brake part would be accessible to any Ford engineer with a laptop, a phone line and a password. Already, Ford has purchased more than 5,000 copies of Netscape Communications Corp.'s Web-browser software so its employees can prowl around the company's intranet.

"We haven't done too well with maintaining our corporate memory," says Mr. Blumberg. Whether Ford employees work in Merkenich, Germany, or Hiroshima, Japan (home of Ford's Japanese partner, Mazda Motor Corp.), they can access intranet sites that detail blueprints of rival vehicles, engineering methods for problems such as door closures, corporate-approved design styles and specs for hundreds of thousands of parts.