Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | A | Automotive Design & Production

Ford: putting on the top hat: commonality as a business practice may help reduce costs, but how do you make sure it doesn't sacrifice product differentiation?

Article Excerpt
For the past several years, automakers have been reducing product development and engineering costs through the reuse of parts and platforms. In several cases, this has resulted in products that look alike so there's little differentiation between vehicle brands, save for interior trim packaging and optional equipment. But this has changed, in large part due to advances in computer-aided design and flexible manufacturing systems. Now automakers can reuse the basic architecture and structure of a vehicle but then put with vastly different body styles, or top hats, over them. Ford is the latest automaker to join the top hat revolution and it is moving aggressively forward with plans to use fewer global architectures over multiple vehicle segments to improve profitability and operational efficiency.

"At Ford, we view the top hat as being the upper body structure of the vehicle which is set on a common set of underpinnings. The upper body could...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!