By Anne Stuart


















In an industry in which major technological change sometimes takes years to complete, Ford executives say their comprehensive network has transformed decades-old processes in a matter of months.





















































































































































"This is the best thing we've ever seen for capturing knowledge, knowing who's doing what, cutting information and distributing it different ways."
-Bob Matulka

They sped across Florida's Alligator Alley in the middle of the night, headed from the Fort Lauderdale airport to an Internet business conference across the state in Naples. They took notes on a laptop computer and talked nonstop abou t their mission as they'd been doing for weeks back in Detroit. Later, between conference sessions, they chose instead to huddle in a hotel room crafting their concise digital document. When they flew home a few days later, they brought with them the roug h draft of a manifesto for revolutionizing the way their company--the world's second-largest automobile and truck manufacturer and fourth-largest industrial corporation--conducted its day-to-day business.
They were a team of true believers from Ford Motor Co.'s fledgling Department of Enterprise Information Management. Their assignment was to develop the underlying strategy for a global corporate intranet. The evangelists and their bosses viewed the resulting document--about 1 1/2 printed pages, plus supporting attachments--as the magic carpet that would carry their industrial behemoth, quickly and relatively painlessly, toward new competitive heights.
A little more than a year later, their vision is becoming Ford's reality: an intranet that, so far, connects 80,000 professional employees worldwide, with projections calling for 95,000 users by the end of this year. In an industry in which major t echnological change sometimes takes years to complete, Ford executives say their comprehensive network has transformed decades-old processes in a matter of months. In many cases, the intranet lets people disseminate information, share best practices, cond uct research, communicate and begin to collaborate in ways they never could before. And even if there's still some resistance and results aren't yet quantifiable, Ford's culture, forged in the early years of the 20th century, is evolving into something qu ite different at the dawn of the 21st.
Enterprise Information Management Supervisor Jeff Balagna remembers sitting in that March 1996 conference listening intently as an executive from another company faltered through a case history of his own organization's Web efforts. The presenter's uncertainty about his Web project's scope, purpose and results cemented Balagna's conviction that an intranet could only work at an organization of Ford's size if it was built on a simple, universally understood strategy.
In finalizing Ford's manifesto, the team made sure every statement boiled down to a single goal: "To move to the Ford Intranet as our way of doing business." Period.
Underlying justifications are equally straightforward. As in the rest of the manufacturing world, "competitive advantage is what we're after: better quality, better speed, better cost," says Bob Matulka, director of Ford's Product Development Leade rship group. Those goals are particularly important in light of cycle times that, in the highly competitive auto industry, have been reduced from four or five years to less than two.

Ford management had known for ages that its professional employees, particularly those in product development and engineering, were drowning in documents: technical data, procedures, manuals, memos, meeting minutes, records and more. Visit a typica l Ford facility and, throughout the football-field-sized maze of cubicles, you'll see row after row of bookshelves crammed with binders that are in turn crammed with paper.
Even people who could find information couldn't necessarily rely on it. That's because a lot of the hard-copy information was outdated, says Stevie Cote, manager of enterprise information management. Team members working on the same project could f ind themselves using different versions of the same documentation if, for instance, the most up-to-date binder hadn't made it to team members in Canada or England or Australia. Even data in digital form might exist only on one person's hard drive.
So it's no surprise that, when asked in in-house surveys in 1994 and 1995 whether they had access to the information they needed to do their jobs, nearly half of Ford's professional workers said they did not.
Clearly, Ford needed a digital solution.
Technologically, moving to an intranet wasn't a stretch. Ford's engineers had collaborated via a global network since the late 1980s. The company's external Web site had been launched the previous year, and several extranets were under development.
"When the Web really started to take off, we had the infrastructure in place to take advantage of it," says J. Kevin Vasconi, who manages the company's 80-person Internet Applications Development Center.
So with support from top management, including Ken Dabrowski, vice president for quality and process leadership, the evangelists took their message to the people.
"The intention was to inform and educate and get some energy around the project," Balagna says of the road shows. Particularly in Europe, where many employees were seeing the Web for the first time, the awareness campaign exceeded the team's wildes t expectations. "You could watch people and quite literally see their mouths drop open," Cote says.
As word spread, so did demand. At each stop, the Web team played to groups as small as 10 or to standing-room-only crowds of 200 or 300 employees three or four times daily for several consecutive days-and they still had to turn people away at the d oor. Team members estimate that they met with about 20,000 employees at 75 locations in less than a year.
Part of their popularity was a factor of timing--specifically the preparation for Ford 2000, the company's ambitious reorganization effort. Launched in 1995, Ford 2000 established a single global management team, merged all operations worldwide int o a single organization and created five vehicle centers for centralized design, development and engineering.
Previously, Ford's product-development and marketing employees received information from their long-standing in-house networks by telephone or paper. But the global restructuring changed all that. "Now none of those [human] networks are in place; e verybody's moved on to new jobs" within the company, Cote says. As a result, workers now need direct access to information, rather than trying to figure out who to call to get it.
Before Ford's intranet debuted in 1996, about 2,000 employees companywide had independently installed browsers and were using the Web.
As department after department signed on, the intranet's global user base grew from that initial 2,000 to 80,000, the digital equivalent of going from 0 to 60 in two seconds. Training was easy. Cote estimates that even the newest users learned Nets cape in 10 or 15 minutes.
For all its depth and technical complexity, the Ford Intranet features a simple, streamlined design on the enterprisewide home page, dubbed the Ford Hub, that serves as the default home page on all desktops, and on the individual sites tailored for use by teams. All home pages use the same basic template with the same basic design: a logo, a simple site directory in two or three frames and a navigation bar across the bottom.
The Ford Hub contains a directory of categories including News, People, Processes, Products and Competition. Pop-up menus detail what's in each category, keeping the home page uncluttered and reducing wasted surfing time. The menu for the competiti on category, for example, tells users that that's the place to go for information on benchmarking, auto shows, global market information, competitor news, product-cycle plans and patent information. The standard calls for pages to be dated and linked to t he author's name and other contact information, so that users can send content managers questions, referrals and reminders about keeping content current.

Currently, the intranet accesses only information existing on internal servers; employees who want to conduct research on external Web sites must receive a manager's permission to venture outside the firewall. Users can find resources through those categories or with a powerful search engine developed by Vasconi's group.
The intranet, the home page of which receives more than a million hits a month, also enhances some employee benefits. Via the intranet, Ford lets employees buy vehicles at discounts. Before the intranet was developed, workers had to meet personally with corporate sales representatives to make their choices for discounted vehicles. Now, employees can use the site to check their eligibility, click through option packages, compute monthly payments, place orders and check their status. An online paint program that is also available on Ford's external site even lets users see how that Mustang convertible would look in Rio Red or Aztec Gold.
But the intranet's real strength is its ability to help users gather a wealth of information that would previously have required several phone calls or a library visit. "This is the best thing we've ever seen for capturing knowledge, knowing who's doing what, cutting information and distributing it different ways," says Matulka.
For instance, in the awareness team's demo, a vehicle team needed data on compressors for climate-control systems in other cars, including competitors' models. Its search of the pilot intranet yielded 18 hits, including other teams' TGW ( "things g one right/wrong") files, minutes of meetings discussing compressor problems and photos from a "teardown," or a painstaking dissection, of a competitor's vehicle.
The intranet's graphical and multimedia capability has been the greatest value for engineers, who buy heavily into that whole picture-thousand words equation. By allowing people to access images on an intranet from wherever they are in the world, F ord shaves weeks off design processes because project managers no longer have to physically mail masses of product documentation all over the globe.

Sitting at his cubicle at the Ford Automatic Transmission Engineering Operations Center, Dennis F. Bayer demonstrates how much easier the intranet has made his life. In the past, Bayer, a unit supervisor, would spend hours chasing after a drawing w hose owner could be anywhere in the company. Sometimes drawings were missing; sometimes they could only be examined with a special viewer. Now Bayer just types in the part number "and boom--there's your drawing," he says as a picture of a driveshaft compo nent materializes on the screen of his desktop PC. Bayer's divisional intranet site also contains the guidelines, manuals and charts employees need to comply with ISO/9001 quality certification standards. For Ed Vela, a Taurus/Sable program manager, the i ntranet has become a way of life. "You check e-mail, you check phone messages, and you check Netscape," Vela says.
While discussing the intranet's ROI, Vela resorts, as many Ford managers do, to baseball metaphors. "I don't think there are any home runs yet," he says. "They're singles and doubles, subtle changes."
For instance, he and others say, intranet use has improved efficiency, reduced phone calls, all but eliminated redundancy, cut down on mistakes and made one time-honored excuse as obsolete as the Edsel: "We don't get people stepping out of the wood work at the eleventh hour, claiming they never got the latest information," Nalon says.
It's also taken a mighty swipe at paper consumption. Matulka estimates that the information now available on the company intranet would total 30,000 pages if printed--a quantity of hard copy that would be highly impractical if not impossible to man age and distribute through traditional methods.
In addition, Ford managers with international responsibility credit the intranet with letting them "follow the sun," handing off work to people overseas so progress can continue overnight. "It makes a 20-hour work day manageable," says Joseph R. Hu ghlett, a quality supervisor in Ford's truck vehicle center.
Hughlett, who works with people in 11 time zones, says the Web lets him notify his far-flung constituents about major announcements much more quickly and in greater detail than when he worked largely by fax and telephone.

Of course, Ford's road to the future has had its rough stretches. Managers report that some employees, particularly those nearing retirement, are reluctant to invest even a minimal amount of time in learning new technology or changing their work ha bits. "It's not that widespread, but it's something we have to overcome," acknowledges Jack Skedd, European manager for information management.
Others remain fearful about break-ins or espionage. That's not surprising in a company so security-conscious that its data center is in an unmarked building and that it requires visitors to obtain a numerical code, which changes daily, before they can exit the parking lot. The fact that Ford's intranet lives on a different server from its external site makes things safer, although Ford outsources the hosting of its Internet presence in order to maximize access for potential customers and not for se curity reasons, says Vasconi.
Another problem is language: Although English is Ford's official language worldwide, it remains a barrier in some regions, particularly at the company's recently acquired facilities in Eastern Europe.
Finally, the system is not yet as fully functional as some would like it to be. For example, most people still use the intranet primarily for research and for team information repositories rather than working together online in real-time. Today, en gineers' chief collaborative use of the intranet is to pull up drawings simultaneously and discuss them on the phone, or to exchange e-mails about them.
Plans call for the further integration of the intranet into all of Ford's systems and processes. Future application development will be "Web-centric," and the company is starting to do "legacy wrapping" in order to give its mainframes new life, say s Vasconi.
As fired up as they are about Ford's intranet, its champions know it will work only as long as it serves the company's core purpose: making and selling cars and trucks. "We've had to think very carefully about what we want to do, what's the value a dded to the business," says Matulka.
Users say they're just beginning to see the rewards the evangelists promised a year ago. "Really, it's just started," says Mark Tranchant, an English engineer who runs a Web site for a global Fiesta team. "This is really just the infancy of it."

Senior Editor Anne Stuart can be reached at astuart@cio.com.