Ford employs new computer to integrate its development
By Russell Williamson
FORD's development of its latest generation computer system, C3P, may have more in common with Star War's character C-3PO than just its name.
Just as the golden robot in the film aimed to bring order to the chaos around it, so too will Ford's computer system integrate vehicle development around the world with a common purpose and language.
The system will combine product development and design at Ford operations in Europe, the United States and Australia through linking them online to help improve quality, reduce costs and shorten product lead times.
The new system -- first integrated into operations in Europe two years ago and expected to be fully operational worldwide by 1999 -- combines computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided manufacture (CAM) and computer-aided engineering (CAE).
Ford Australia's vice president of product development, Ian Vaughan, said that through using computers to develop design, manufacturing and engineering processes, Ford could identify potential problems early in the design phase before prototypes or even clay models were built.
"The C3P technology allows the company's design, engineering and assembly systems to talk to each other, reducing the need for time-consuming translations and removing the possibility of misinterpretation of shared data," Vaughan said.
By using the new computer technology, Ford hopes to reduce the number of clay models built from the 25-30 currently used for a typical U.S. product development program to about two or three, while eliminating about 90 percent of physical prototypes by 2000.
The development of the C3P system is a continuation of Ford's growing use of computerization in car development that has expanded rapidly in the past two decades.
In terms of computing power, the company had the equivalent of two Cray C90 supercomputers in 1990. This has grown to an equivalent power of 115 Crays last year and is expected to reach 1573 by 2000.
In conjunction with the increasing power has come a reduction of costs. In 1985, the cost of a frontal crash simulation was US$60,000. Today, this has fallen to $200 and by 2001, a crash simulation will cost less than $10.
For a person to conduct the crash simulation test with a pencil and paper would take 68 million years while it could be done on a personal computer in 15 weeks. However, with Ford's 16 processor Triton supercomputer it takes just 15 minutes.
Similarly, in design terms, it takes a dozen people 12 weeks to design a car from a clean sheet of paper to a clay model while one designer can go from an idea on a computer screen to a fully animated video of a car design in three weeks.
With the integration of C3P worldwide, the benefits of Ford's computer system will be available to designers and engineers across the globe.
No longer will cars be designed and developed in one place but -- in line with the Ford 2000 globalization program -- there will more than likely be input from all operations and supplier bases.
Through sharing design information and developing new products on computer, Ford hopes to be able to reduce the amount of late engineering changes by as much as 50 percent.
This will benefit both the development of the product and the manufacturing operations, which are all interlinked.
"C3P will provide manufacturing with more complete product information earlier in the design process," Vaughan said.
"The CAD model will allow product design changes to flow directly to and from manufacturing."
The integration of computer technology will also allow suppliers -- who can access the Ford process online -- to be brought into the design process earlier, once again improving the quality of the process and reducing development costs and times.