It's e-business. And it's transforming how a car's life cycle is managed - electronic commerce for automotive industry and Johnson Controls case study

Automotive Design & Production, Oct, 2002

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 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 Management tools are central to making this happen. And making those PLM 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 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 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 and duplicated design effort. In fact, they were using six different CAD systems to satisfy different OEM 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 PLM tools. (Soon, seating engineers will all be able to use CATIA design software, for instance.)

The result? Johnson Controls says this promises to be "a significant improvement against our former processes." They'll he 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 be 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 electronics and software -- which can provide you with vital customer feedback, which in turn can be cycled into new models -- a virtuous circle.)

We also know how to transform a complicated system into a well-oiled e-business infrastructure -- one that hums from drawing hoard 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

IBM[TM]

@.business is the game. Play to win[TM].