Ford Europe has outlined its plans to cut costs by £75m as
part of the company's global £9bn cost-cutting
drive.
The motor manufacturer is adopting a three-pronged cost-cutting
programme. Projects that are not judged to be important to
customers or manufacturers or are not aimed at reducing costs will
be cut back or dropped; assets will be "sweated" in an attempt to
gain better value; and Ford will push for supplier and contractor
discounts.
Ford Europe hopes to make savings of £75m in IT spending following
ratification of cost-cutting measures at a meeting attended by
senior company vice-presidents in early June.
A new dealer front-end for an "order-to-delivery" system will now
only be rolled out to the five biggest European markets, while a
payroll system upgrade will now be deferred for one year. A user
self-service human resources system will also be deferred.
Richard Thwaite, IT director at Ford Europe, said, "With things
like administration activities, where it is nice to have, for
example, faster systems, but they are not critical, we will defer
projects. IT is like any other department - we have to take
responsibility and we are trying to make more efficient use of our
spend."
Thwaite said his department would also look at ways of gaining
economies of scale by sharing IT spend across other Ford brands
such as Land Rover, Jaguar and Volvo.