Ford Motor Company’s organization

The Ford motor company was formed in 1903 by Henry Ford whose aim was to provide the
people with a cheap and affordable car that any middle class employed person could own. Ford
Motor Company is a famous company which selling automotive. It is also a global automotive
industry leader based in Dearborn, Michigan. It manufactures or distributes automobiles across
six continents.
In 1995, Ford had embarked on an ambitious restructuring plan called Ford 2000, which included
merging its North American, European, and international automotive operations into a single
global. Ford 2000 helps company reduce the cost by reengineering and globalizing corporate
organizations and processes. The major reengineering projects were initiated around major
company processes such as Order to Delivery (OTD) and Ford Production System (FPS), with
goals such as reducing OTD time from more than 60 days to less than 15 days.
Ford also launched a public Internet site in mid- 1995; by mid- 1997 the number of visits to the
site had reached more than 1 million per day. A companywide Intranet was launched in mid-
1996. And by January 1997 Ford had in place a business-to-business capability through which
the Intranet could be extended in a secure manner beyond company boundaries into an Extranet
potentially connecting Ford with its suppliers. Ford teamed with Chrysler and General Motors to
work on the Automotive Network Exchange, which can help suppliers to manage different
means of interaction with each automaker to be consistency in technology standards and
processes in the supplier network.
In the supply chain area, there was general agreement that information technology also could be
deployed to dramatically enhance material flows and reduce inventories, substituting information
for inventory, as the expression went. So in the plan of Ford 2000, for meeting the aim on
reengineering projects, having a nice supply chain management systems and customer
relationship management systems can help the company more close to suppliers and customers
which can easy to reduce the cost on order to delivery system and ford production system. As
that time Internet revolution unfolded in parallel, Ford Motor Company created new possibilities
for reengineering processes within and between enterprises by using Internet.
Order to Delivery
For another key process Ford reengineering projects is looking for improve the customer
relationship management system. The information system to do that is Order to Delivery, the
purpose of this system was to reduce to 15days the time from a customer’s order to delivery of
the finished product. The Order to Delivery vision was to create a lean, flexible, and predictable
process that harmonized the efforts of all of Ford’s components to enable it to provide consumers
with right product in right place at right time, which means that it can help Ford Motor Company
meet the just-in-time technique. By achieving Order to Delivery, Ford believed that it would
provide better quality, higher customer satisfaction, improved customer selection, better plant
productivity, stability for its supply base, and lower dealer and company costs.

Using SAP® software

Until now, Ford not only just follows the web-site to provide the service to customers, for
achieving total supply chain visibility in real time, increasing dealer and customer service
satisfaction and minimizing costs, especially ongoing IT costs, Ford also using SAP® software,
to improve the performance on supply chain management and customer relationship
management.

Problems and challenges in the development of the

Information System
When Ford Motor Company developed the information system, it needs to face lots of
challenges. Here are some of them.

1. Costly and timely

As Ford is a large company, it is very costly on developing information system. There are
complex pieces of software which Ford developed to achieve its competitive advantage. To
develop these large system, Ford need to spend its recourses. Not only the cost on buying
software and hardware of the system, but also other cost such as consulting fees, personnel costs,
training. Also, most of them need to spend time to develop. For Ford Motor Company, it has
large team on Information Technology, which needs to hire lots of employees to work. There are
costly on the salaries and also it needs spend over one month to train the employees to
understand the system and use the system.
As Ford adopts an enterprise application from SAP, it is very costly to switch SAP and it became
dependent on SAP to upgrade its product and maintain its installation.
Hard to handle the technology
As the technology of information system such as internet is growth quickly, it is not easy for
Ford Motor Company to understand clearly about the technology, it will be a risk on losing
money when develop that technology. So when developing the information system, Ford needs
to make sure it understands what is its usage clearly

Conclusion
In short, Ford uses information technology on business manager, SCM and CRM, for enhanced
customer and supplier successfully. It can see that information system can help Ford achieve its
business model.
Nowadays, every company will develop the information system to achieve competitive, most of
them have the e-business, too. It is surly that information system is a very useful and major tool
to help company to meet their aims. However, it does not mean have information system can
help the company to do a successful business, because the most important is that company have a
correct business strategy. As the example on Ford, its business model is cost leadership; it is a
great competitive advantage at early 1900s when Ford provided Model T cars. However,
following the change of environment, it is not work now. So, if a company want to achieve
competitive, it is not only focusing on develop information system, but also focusing on the
business strategy.