Ford C3P Midterm Report: Earning Straight A's
2 June 1998
Ford C3P Midterm Report: Earning Straight A's
DEARBORN, Mich., June 2 -- Ford Motor Company has
begun to realize hundreds of millions of dollars in savings through its
breakthrough product development computer technology called C3P.
Early in its third year of operation, C3P is at the halfway mark of its
implementation. Fifteen vehicle programs are under development with C3P, with
two to be added by midyear. At year's end, 20 to 24 vehicle programs will be
on line with C3P, compared with seven at the end of 1997. In 2000, Ford will
bring to market small, medium and large cars, a truck and a sport utility
vehicle using C3P.
The company expects a 25 percent rise in productivity in design
engineering by the end of 1998.
When the transformation to C3P -- the largest computer-based technology
transformation in corporate history -- is complete, all Ford development teams
around the world will have at their fingertips the collective knowledge of the
rest of the company, present and past.
A recent example shows how Ford's integrated computer system can pay big
dividends. Using C3P tools, engineers recently identified a front rail design
as incompatible with plant equipment during the concept design phase of a Ford
B-segment car in Europe. The early catch saved the company $30 million to
$60 million -- money it would have spent trying to correct the problem at the
plant as the model was awaiting final assembly.
"We are committed to shrinking the asset base at Ford, reducing our break-
even point and getting the cost of our products down," said Paul Blumberg,
director of product development systems at Ford's Product Development Center.
"There's overcapacity in the automotive sector, so it's a buyer's market."
The example also serves to show how time can be thrifted from the product
development process.
"With an automated ability to do design, we can embed best-in-class
performance criteria of a component, such as a crankshaft, into the software
that produces the design, and then we can generate a crankshaft in a flash,"
Blumberg said.
"This will lead to the next quantum leap in cycle time compression. Along
with reusability, we also gain investment reduction and improved product
quality."
Ford is using C3P technology to cut vehicle development time from
37 months to 24 months from program approval to Job One. "And we intend to
reduce development time further -- to 18 months or even less," Blumberg said.
C3P uses a product information management (PIM) system to integrate
computer-aided design (CAD), engineering (CAE) and manufacturing (CAM) into a
global system of common data. The information will be accessible to all
automotive disciplines within Ford and its suppliers to improve product
quality, reduce cost and time to market.
"Our PIM technology is the wave of the future," Blumberg said. "We're
learning to embed into the technology an alternative knowledge base. Not just
lessons learned, but a knowledge base that works with engineers and designers
proactively as they're doing their job to alert them to issues previous teams
have encountered and developed solutions to overcome."
By the end of the second quarter, 3,600 Ford designers and engineers will
have been trained on C3P and another 500 by the end of the year. Eventually,
more than 8,000 Ford employees and suppliers will use the technology. One
hundred suppliers will be virtually collocated to Ford teams directly though
PIM by midyear, and more than 400 suppliers are connected electronically to
C3P.
The front rail example also points to the importance of managing
concurrent activities.
"Product development is like a factory that is taking engineering and
creativity, melding in customer wants, processing all of the information and
getting it to manufacturing in the most accurate and complete manner without
any glitches," Blumberg said.
A Reduction in Prototypes
C3P also has addressed one of the costliest and most time-consuming
aspects of the product development process -- the development of prototype
vehicles and the accompanying validation testing.
The Digital Buck -- a computer-generated full-vehicle prototype --
significantly reduces the dependency on physical bucks and provides early
identification of mechanical package issues and manufacturing concerns 20
months before Job One.
With C3P, Ford has succeeded in reducing the number of prototypes by
25 percent, with a goal of eliminating 80 percent to 90 percent of the bucks
when all vehicle programs have migrated to C3P.
"If you have to build a physical buck to validate information or build one
to crash into barriers at $200,000 a crack, it gets to be very costly and time
consuming," Blumberg said.
"With the most advanced simulation capability in the industry, we can
virtually crash test prototypes literally hundreds of times. We can make even
small changes to components and immediately see the impact of these changes on
the vehicle's overall crash performance. This allows us to truly optimize our
vehicle's ability to protect passengers in real-life crashes," he said.
"It's no coincidence that we have more five-star safety-certified vehicles
than all of the other manufacturers combined. When you blend extremely
advanced computer technology with our smart and creative engineering talent,
our customers win out with safer, higher quality cars and trucks."