It's e-business. And it's transforming how a car's life cycle is managed.From concept to assembly line to showroom floor, e-business has moved to the center of the car business. And it's bringing automakers closer and closer to being able to make the right car at the right price at the right time for the right person. How do you win at this game? It's a transformational time in the auto game. Gleaning Harvesting for free distribution to the needy, or for donation to a nonprofit organization for ultimate distribution to the needy, an agricultural crop that has been donated by the owner. hard data from the driver's experience is becoming increasingly important to product development. Meanwhile, squeezing costs, reducing inventory and shortening cycle time remain as critical as ever. Integrating suppliers, designers and manufacturers with the assembly line, dealerships and customers -- that's the automotive game today. And that's e-business. IT'S NOT JUST PART OF THE GAME -- IT IS THE GAME e-business integrates your business processes, end to end. Today, this means outside designers, suppliers and manufacturers are becoming a part of your internal business processes. Product Lifecycle Product lifecycle or product life cycle is the course of a product's sales and profits over time. The five stages of each product lifecycle are product development, introduction, growth, maturity and decline. Management tools are central to making this happen. And making those PLM (Product Life cycle Management) A comprehensive information system that coordinates all aspects of a product from initial concept to its eventual retirement. Sometimes called the "digital backbone" of a product, it includes the requirements phase, analysis and design tools work with your legacy systems -- and everybody else's -- is what we do best. TO WIN, YOU NEED TO BE A WELL-OILED MACHINE 80% of a car's cost used to occur in manufacturing. Today, 80% of the cost is established at the design phase. Increasingly, a car is designed, tested and manufactured on a computer screen before it ever reaches an assembly line. The more tightly integrated your IT systems, the shorter your cycle times, the higher the quality of the vehicle, and the more money you save. Underlying the integration of external design and manufacturing processes (along with procurement, logistics, supply chains, marketing, customer feedback and more) is your infrastructure. It should be open, flexible and resilient, in order to cycle in new software and new business practices as they become known. CASE STUDY: JOHNSON CONTROLS Johnson Controls, Inc. (NYSE: JCI) is a United States company, based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, specializing in the design, manufacturing, and installation of automotive systems, automotive batteries (Optima[1] based in Denver, Colorado) and climate control systems. Johnson Controls makes seat systems, instrument panels and other vehicle interior parts. Their products can be found in more than 23 million vehicles worldwide. They called on IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) to help them maximize efficiencies throughout the firm's engineering operations. Because Johnson Controls works with 20 different car and truck manufacturers, they knew they had a lot of fragmented data silos (1) A separate database or set of data files that are not part of an organization's enterprise-wide data administration. See siloed application. (2) An external storage array or cabinet. See disk array. and duplicated design effort. In fact, they were using six different CAD systems to satisfy different OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) The rebranding of equipment and selling it. The term initially referred to the company that made the products (the "original" manufacturer), but eventually became widely used to refer to the organization that buys the products and customer demands. IBM helped Johnson Controls begin implementation of a single engineering approach -- an approach that could eliminate the inefficiencies from their business units, thereby cutting costs and getting products to market faster. Together, IBM and Johnson Controls are creating a new business model that relies on standardized standardized pertaining to data that have been submitted to standardization procedures. standardized morbidity rate see morbidity rate. standardized mortality rate see mortality rate. PLM tools. (Soon, seating engineers will all he able to use CATIA A family of 2D and 3D CAD programs from IBM. CATIA was one of the first CAD programs to provide 3D solid modeling. The program was developed by Dassault Systems, a French aerospace company. design software, for instance.) The result? Johnson Controls says this promises to be "a significant improvement against our former processes." They'll be able to turn some quotes around in minutes instead of weeks. In some cases, prototypes may be built in days instead of months -- and in many cases, they can he eliminated altogether. WE'VE GOT PEOPLE WHO GET IT It's not just about e-business. And it's not just the car business. It's the intersection of the two. And few reside quite as comfortably at that intersection as we do. We have automotive specialists across the globe -- in Detroit, Stuttgart, Sao Paulo, Tokyo and beyond. We understand the pressure to cut time to market and to move toward enhancing the ownership experience over the life of the car. (Our research indicates that within five years, 90 percent of all car innovations will be in onboard Refers to a chip or other hardware component that is directly attached to the printed circuit board (motherboard). Contrast with offboard. See inboard. electronics and software -- which can provide you with vital customer feedback, which in turn can be cycled into new models -- a virtuous circle virtuous circle n. A condition in which a favorable circumstance or result gives rise to another that subsequently supports the first. Also called virtuous cycle. [Modeled on vicious circle.] .) We also know how to transform a complicated system into a well-oiled e-business infrastructure -- one that hums from drawing board to driveway. This is one game you want to play with people who know the industry. To learn about PLM and more, visit ibm.com/playtowin/automotive |
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