Guest Editorial By Tim Moran(Some Where In Afganastan)From the October Eye For Auto Monthly Newsletter

Commander Bob and Pilot Bill are currently helping the U.S. to attack Afghanistan.

Sounds a little bit like a bedtime story, doesn’t it? But it’s true. Journalists who have been granted the privilege of being near U.S. and allied forces to cover America’s great big war on terrorism have apparently signed on to a general consent decree to not only appear uninformed, but to also file reports for the rest of the world that sound truly stupid.

Not only does this make them look like total hose-heads, but it strains the credulity of almost anybody listening, reading or watching their broadcasts.

"I’m in an undisclosed location talking with a U.S. Navy officer whom I can only identify as ‘Commander Bob," they say. "Just minutes ago, Commander Bob addressed the ship’s crew to tell them that what they were doing was vitally important. We don’t know what the ship is meant to be doing, and we aren’t allowed to tell you whether we even know what the ship has done. But that’s the news from the undisclosed location."

It’s real compelling stuff, and, of course, makes everybody at home feel just wonderful about how well the U.S. is doing in its new seriousness about controlling global terrorism.

What it shows is just how much glib stupidity the Internet reveals in play when those who consider themselves to be in charge also believe themselves to be in control of information.

It’s a lesson that automotive suppliers at the lowest levels need to take note of, because, in many ways, they are being asked to perform just as the 'journalists' accompanying U.S. forces are: unquestioning, unchallenging, waiting for the tiny bit of data that might come their way on a golden shovel.

The news audience, for example, may blandly accept the existence of 'Commander Bob.' Anyone with an Internet connection, and knowing the ship’s name, can probably find the ship’s website and go directly to Commander Bob’s welcome speech to new crew members and his resume, including recent postings and his command likes and dislikes.

In the case of a particular U.S. aircraft carrier, helpful web postings reveal its deck size, recent promotions and changes in command, indications of what flight elements are based 'at home' and not on the carrier at this time, and pictures of what’s been going on.

There’s a compelling little sketch of daily life among the support sections of the crew, some interesting notes on what kinds of airplanes can carry cluster bomb ordnance and how long airborne tanker planes can remain on station, and if that isn’t enough, the web site also plays 'Anchors Aweigh' while the viewer is scanning the home page.

So while the people at the scene are functioning in a Kindergarten world of information charades with Commander Bob, the people farthest from the action, with any access at all, are scooping up the kind of detailed information that reveals what the fluorescent lighting looks like in the overhead - and learning just who the only nuclear-submarine-qualified F/A-18 Hornet pilot in the Navy may be.

It’s a remarkable reverse-lens blur in the electronic information stream, and it reflects not only the power that drives e-business but also the fog that happens between those who think they control information, and those who need to use information.

DaimlerChrysler information technology staff, sniffing out the possibilities of real-time data flow to the sub-tier suppliers, investigated two different data models involving the kind of transactions currently handled by electronic data interchange. The automotive theory has been that of a technology waterfall: New methods flow down in steps from the biggest to the smallest.

What DCX found out about information dissemination, and discussed during August’s Auto-Tech conference, is both chilling and infuriating to anybody who expects a lean industry or build-to-order end-to-end connectivity.

When DCX tracked information flow down its Tier ranks, it discovered that its three-month forecasts were not only delayed, but also pared, at each interface level. In other words, before the company itself released the information, managers along the line held up the message and extracted key bits of it.

At the Tier 1 level, the transaction was received and disappeared into the supplier operations. When the message emerged to go farther down the chain, even more information was missing, and the information that was present was already out of date.

The difficulty with this filtering process is that the lowest-tier companies typically need the longest lead time to prepare the products that will be used in upper-tier assemblies.

The people who really need three months of lead time are, for example, the bulk woven material makers who would really like to know how many yards of fabric to prepare.

In the DCX example, those are exactly the people who received the least information and the shortest lead time. Not only did they get too little, too late, but they even may have gotten the wrong information - because, somewhere up the chain, someone with control issues may have taken out the key data bits that might define the expected length of a vehicle run.

And somewhere, up the chain, everybody took out timeliness.

Who can blame the companies with the least flexibility, the lowest profit margins and the most at risk if they dare to question today’s e-business 'lean manufacturing' talk?

The Tier 1 who saw information that led to potential doubt about a vehicle platform, but didn’t pass that on, can probably stride past the disappointment of a smaller vehicle run than initially forecast. The factory owner who busted his budget to buy expensive machine tools, dies or molds to make wheel covers in quantity, only to discover, several change orders later, that the platform program he was supposed to supply has been trimmed, is unlikely to recover the costs.

Major Tier auto suppliers wouldn’t resort to petty control games, though, would they? Well - if the recent grumbling on the part of suppliers who would like to showcase themselves during the North American International Auto Show is any indicator, there’s a certain amount of junior high school-style rivalry out there.

Johnson Controls, trade marker of the term Peer Partnering, integrator par excellence, bought the sponsorship rights and is not going to let its competitors in. The word 'mine!' as spoken by a two-year-old springs to mind, but, hey, that’s life in the brave new world of 'co-opetition.' JCI isn’t wrong in its stance; they had the courage and the idea, first, to put up their own trunk show at the NAIAS rather than at the Delphi- and Visteon-dominated Society of Automotive Engineers World Congress. But now that Delphi and Visteon have given SAE the cold shoulder, and decided that JCI’s auto show digs look mighty tasty, there’s a certain amount of sniping going on, along with cries of 'unfair!'

Most companies have a limited number of ways to approach the world. If the big boys and girls are playing the dominance game about marketing, you can bet that somewhere inside that corporate culture, there’s also an information ownership dominance game going on.

Perhaps it’s time for an information industry that turns that game completely on its head.

The OEMs are unlikely to pass information simultaneously to favored Tier 1s and to tiny sub-tier suppliers. But, like the information that abounds on the exact parts of the U.S. military machine that’s out there in the world, enough information also abounds on the specifics of OEM plant capacity, platform hopes and dreams, labor force willingness to work, dealership and retail customer relationship management, for something like a suppliers’ council to challenge up the chain. At the very least, sub-tiers pooling and sharing their own information through third-party channels ought to be able to come up with something that supplements the dross they may be receiving from 'Commander Bob' style information controllers.

The leveling factor of the Internet has been to put vast amounts of data within the reach of people who have the will to look. The decision for auto suppliers to go look for it, rather than to blindly and blandly accept what is fed to them, might be available as a circuit-breaker to the mushroom treatment. Mushrooms, as you remember, are kept in the dark and fed a load of ... compost.