Little separates Europe's top six vehicle manufacturers' products and sales
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volumes. Ford believes the way to get ahead is to offer the best parts back-up as possible. And that means a high degree of automation. Bob Greenwood reports from the company's ultra-modern Cologne parts distribution centre
STAFF at Ford's Daventry parts distribution centre know her as Jackie DOES. In her native Canada and the USA she is known as actress Jackie Rowan. But to parts department personnel at Ford-main dealers throughout Europe she is simply a voice speaking in English with only a trace of a North American accent.
DOES is an acronym. It stands for Direct Order Entry System and it gives dealers instant access to information on which of Ford of Europe's 13 part centres has a particular part, what its availability is and how much it will cost.
All the agent needs to supply is a seven-digit part or FINIS (Ford International Numerical Identification System) number. Jackie's pre-recorded voice takes the user through a sequence of steps to the information wanted.
Once the part is located the order is keyed in. For back orders delivery is made within three days. When parts are needed urgently, the system is very rapid indeed. If a lorry driver should be stuck outside Sienna with a semi-trailer of soft fruit for want of a replacement water pump for his Transcontinental and it has to be ordered from Daventry — the main source for Ford commercial vehicle parts in Europe — that pump should be with the local dealer within 24 hours. It will have been flown from Heathow to the nearest local airport as part of an airfreight consignment made up of routinely ordered spares for dealers in northern Italy.
Every time airfreight packages are put together the DOES computer scans the current list of VOR (Vehicle Off Road) orders so that parts which need to be rushed out can be added at the last minute. VOR orders received before 12.30pm will normally be shipped out before 4pm the same day.
The DOES system is one of several computer based systems in the Ford parts distribution network. It was piloted at Daventry and went on stream five years ago, when it was installed at 550 dealers in the UK. Since then it has extended throughout Europe. It would be hard to imagine the company's parts operation functioning without computers. The statistics are awesome: there are 12 million Ford vehicles on the roads of Europe: their owners are served by more than 6,000 dealers in 15 countries; more than 1.5 million new Fords are registered each year. To keep the lorries, vans and cars running 200,000 tonnes of replacement parts and accessories are dispatched annually by the parts distribution centres.
Daventry accounts for a third of this area (nearly 1.6 million sqft or 148,000sqm), making it not only the largest of the 13 parts depots, but also the largest single storey warehouse in Europe.
It is, however, at the second largest parts warehouse (1.3 million sqft or 120,000sqm) at Merkenich near Cologne where the most recent developments in computer controlled warehouse operation have been taking place.
As reported in CM last week, the Cologne centre is used as a testing ground for new systems which, if suitable, will be installed at other parts centres. It is in the second phase of a five-phase extensive automa
tion programme for the network. (Daventry is currently at phase one.) Cologne was chosen to pilot new parts handling systems for one very good reason. In 1977 the parts centre was devastated by the worst fire in West Germany since the Second World War, John Hardiman, Ford's vice-president for European Parts and Service Operations, explained: "We started from point zero. We had to invent much of the technology ourselves."
One technology which has been developed by Ford at Cologne, although not invented, is voice controlled order processing. At present this is limited to the order dispatch department.
Instead of going around with clipboards and pens and filling in forms, order packing staff (who ride around on electric trucks) call off orders to visual display units by speaking into a voice encoder. They are presented with order lists, go off and collect the required items and verbally tick them off the list. The advantage is that the operatives are not held up by paperwork. As Martin Hoogerwerf, office operations managet at Cologne who developed the system with its supplier, Computer Gesellschaft Konstanz, pointed out: "Our prime goal is to move parts — not paper."
The paperwork comes after the orders have been filled, in the form of shipping documents. It will probably be quite a long time before those are replaced by electronic information technology.
One of the problems which had to be overcome for the system to work was that 40 per cent of the Merkenich centre's workforce is Turkish — the voice encoder had to be able to understand their commands as well as those of their German speaking colleagues. The answer was more computer power. The 512-bit pattern offered was feared to be inadequate and so a 1,024-bit pattern was adopted.
Although the encoder is now able to understand up to 400 commands, Martin Hoogerwerf and his colleagues decided to play safe and limit it to a vocabulary of 60 to reduce the chances of similar-sounding words to those which the computer is programmed to accept inadvertently activating the system. After a few "teething troubles" the system has been operating successfully since mid 1983.
The racks from which orders will have been picked for shipment have to be replenished regularly. For non-sheet metal items operatives use electric trucks with computer terminals on them which are linked to a central computer by radio. This system is in the final stages of commissioning and should be fully operational in this area of the warehouse by early next year, when there will be 144 terminals in use.
Their function is to make smoother the movement of components from reserve stocks forward to the primary order picking sites. They guided the fork truck drivers to the nearest suitable primary picking location, at the same time telling them how many items to move on allowing them to up