Word: forde
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...only slightly during fiscal 1998, the company's sales topped $6 billion--a 19% jump over 1997. "Systems suppliers are getting a bigger piece of the pie," says Anders Franzen, vice president for strategic sourcing at Sweden's Volvo, which is now in the process of being purchased by Ford...
...company that is buying Volvo's carmaking division is no slouch at sequencing either. In Saarlouis, Germany, Ford representatives show off a 3,000-foot-long ski-lift contraption that feeds 58,000 sequenced components daily into the company's assembly flow, replacing 3 million miles' worth of truck travel over the course of the year. The modular scheme will enable the company to offer the same diversity of car models on just 16 different chassis by next year, down from 32 platforms in 1998, as part of an overall plan to trim yearly costs $1 billion worldwide...
...Ford purchasing boss Hans-Peter Kunze says his company intends to work even more closely with suppliers in the future. That will mean assigning more and more work to a smaller number of systems partners, who will in turn contract the work with more outsiders. As a result, the number of suppliers dealing directly with Ford is expected to continue dropping. "For the Escort, we worked with about 700 suppliers directly, and for the new Focus it's only 210," he says, talking about Ford's European models. "For the car we're planning as a replacement for the Fiesta...
...bought by bigger companies. Dynamit Nobel is part of Germany's Metallgesellschaft. Budd Automotive, which introduced the all-steel body in 1914, is now part of Thyssen Budd Automotive, which will soon be folded into emerging industrial conglomerate Thyssen Krupp AG. Carmakers themselves are also creating new players. Both Ford and GM have turned their component divisions into distinct profit centers with fancy names like Visteon and Delphi, and Renault and Fiat recently announced they were blending their foundry activities into a $2 billion-a-year systems supplier...
Skeptics--"pistonheads," Ballard calls them--say the company is decades away from making fuel-cell cars affordable, if it ever can. But some of the largest automakers are betting on a hydrogen future. DaimlerChrysler and Ford have paid $750 million for 35% of Ballard Power Systems, vowing to market fuel-cell cars within five years. Since hydrogen is difficult to store, current research focuses on fueling the cars with methanol, from which hydrogen would be extracted on board. That process would produce pollution, but not nearly as much as conventional engines give...