Ford : An Intelligent Business Using Business Intelligence

When you talk about automakers and enterprises that have redefined the landscape of the automotive industry, the Ford Motor Company is one of the first enterprises that come to mind. An American multinational automaker, headquartered in Dearborn, Michigan, Ford has a footprint all around the world. Ford manufactures the spectrum of automobiles ranging from personal vehicles, commercial vehicles and luxury vehicles. It has redefined the industry by inventing methods of large-scale production of cars and management of large workforces with the most popular invention being the moving assembly lines.

More recently, Ford has been constantly evolving to meet the changing demands of its customer, keeping up with the latest trends and to stand out in a very competitive industry. A big part of Ford’s strategy to stay on top of the advancing technology is to make the best use of big data within their enterprise. They generate massive amounts of data in their company and the cars they manufacture generate enormous amounts of data too. Whether it is adapting their business strategy or changing the metal used in manufacturing their latest vehicles, Ford has relied on some very intricate metrics that are derived from all the data at their disposal to make such critical decisions. 

Some such metrics that are critical for Ford’s leadership to make well-informed decisions are outlined below

Financial Health Index

A metric that encompasses the financials of the company by factoring in investments, revenue, sales, expenses, taxes and other monetary aspects of the Enterprise. This metric will help the leadership team makes decisions about the areas of the company that need investments, areas that are performing well, areas that need to be sold and so on.

Operating Productivity Per Business Unit

A metric that tracks the productivity of the various business units within Ford. It helps the leadership decide to budget their investments into the different business units based on their productivity and past return of investment.

Units Sold By Type of Vehicle

A metric that gives information about the most and least popular vehicles sold by Ford. Leadership can make decisions on increasing or decreasing the units of the cars produced based on the revenue the car is making for Ford.

Harmful Emission Levels Per Vehicle

An aggregated metric that tracks harmful tailpipe emissions for every Ford vehicle. This will ensure compliance with the legal norms and help leadership decide if they need to reduce such harmful emissions to stay in alignment with their principles of being a green-company.

Customer Acquisition Cost

A metric that informs the total cost of getting a new customer onboard. It would encompass expenses in marketing, sales and various domains that would be required to convert a prospective customer to an actual customer.

Customer Satisfaction Index

An aggregated metric that tracks a customer’s satisfaction with Ford’s products, services and overall experience. Ford is a very customer-focused company and upholding customer satisfaction promises continued revenue. Poor customer satisfaction can help leadership focus on resolving or getting rid of their pain points.

Employee Satisfaction Index

An aggregated metric that tracks an employee’s satisfaction. Keeping track of an employee’s satisfaction gives the leadership valuable insights into an employee’s utilization, productivity and loyalty to the company.

Network Traffic Volume

A metric that gives insights on the volume of traffic in and out of the Ford intranet and internet websites. This can help the leadership gauge the interests of their customers and employees. It can also help them monitor their IT infrastructure.

A lot of such metrics are generated by developing dimensional models and data warehouses that enable storing large volumes of data and extremely quick information retrieval. Ford can leverage these data warehouses and dimensional models to achieve the following advantages

• It provides a single repository of reconciled information from the various data sources within the company.
• It gives business users the ability to generate ad-hoc reports and perform quick analyses.
• The dimensional models allow the company to be more flexible with the warehousing solutions and ensures a scope for scalability if or when required.
• It also promises a seamless user experience owing to the fast speeds of information retrieval.
• It gives users a drill-down ability to access different reports by traversing via other reports.
• Dimensional models also give Ford the freedom to choose from the plethora of Business Intelligence tools available in the market to visualize the data.

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Motor_Company#Operations

https://corporate.ford.com/microsites/sustainability-report-2016-17/performance/key-performance.html

https://gigaom.com/2014/02/08/3-lessons-in-big-data-from-the-ford-motor-company/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/martinzwilling/2011/09/28/10-metrics-every-growing-business-must-keep-an-eye-on/

http://www.sys-seminar.com/EE/Files/dimensional_data_modeling.pdf