Ford Motor Company is the second largest producer of cars and trucks in the world. Ford automotive trustmarks include Aston Martin, Ford, Jaguar, Land Rover, Lincoln, Mercury, Volvo, and Mazda (Ford owns a 33.4% controlling interest). The Ford Financial trustmark includes Ford Credit, the largest automobile finance company in the US. Ford also owns Hertz, the world's largest car-rental firm. Ford is currently ranked fourth on the Fortune 100 list of the largest corporations in America.

The purpose of this assessment was for EWSolutions to provide Ford with a vendor neutral, third party evaluation of Ford’s Enhanced Concern Identification (“ECI”) business intelligence/data warehouse. The ECI assessment examined this multi-terabyte data warehouse from the technical standpoint of sustainable architecture, cost of initiative, system performance, business value, technology selection and industry best practices. Ford’s main objective for this Assessment was to ensure that the ECI system was built on a sound technology platform and had a technical architecture that would allow it to be a long-term solution at Ford. Ford required this Assessment to be completed as expediently as possible. During this brief, high-level Assessment, two EWSolutions consultants conducted 19 extended interviews with key Ford personnel. Deliverables included a nine-page technical document that detailed the specific problems with ECI’s physical data model (along with the appropriate fixes), a five page project summary and a 50 page PowerPoint assessment that was presented to senior members of Ford’s business and technical teams.

Since completion of this effort, EWSolutions was engaged to assess the synergy between ECI and another multi-terabyte data warehouse, to determine the pros and cons of integrating these data warehouses, examine various alternatives, develop a recommended approach and complete a cost-benefit analysis associated with this effort.

EWSolutions also supported the Ford Data Warehousing / Business Intelligence Center of Excellence (CoE) Initiative. Over the years, Ford has established many data warehouses and decision support systems. These include a dozen data warehouses greater than a terabyte in size, roughly fifty smaller data warehouses, and possibly hundreds of independent data marts. While many of these information systems continue to provide significant returns, Ford has never established a central organization that is responsible for data warehousing activities and architecture. As a result, there is very little consistency in processes, tremendous data redundancy, application redundancy, inefficient data architecture, and inconsistent technologies utilized across these systems. All of these factors create a very large IT cost drain and limit Ford’s ability to build quality data warehousing systems. In addition, these numerous, “stove pipe” decision support systems satisfy specific informational requirements, but do not enable higher-level decisions based on an integrated view of this information.

The ultimate goal of the Enterprise Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing CoE is to ensure that the data warehousing efforts at Ford are of high quality, efficient, cost effective and valuable to the company. In order to facilitate these objectives, the CoE is developing a standardized, enterprise architecture for business intelligence and data warehousing. To assist Ford in this effort, EWSolutions provided highly experienced resources focused on enterprise meta data architecture, enterprise data warehousing architecture, and enterprise process standards for data warehousing.