Sun services bring savings to Jaguar and Land Rover merging IT

Ford-owned Jaguar and Land Rover say they’ve already seen “significant” cost savings and service improvements as a result of moving to Sun Microsystems’ managed services for their currently merging total UK IT infrastructure. The deal was signed on April 1 after just six weeks of consultation, superseding three separate hardware support contracts. Matt Cadieux, UK infrastructure manager for the car makers, says: “There were immediate savings from merging the three contracts into one.” He expects more to follow as the efficiencies and improvements from having Sun IT people and kit on site – rather than external pools – with a mandate to be proactive on maintenance and support, kick in. It’s a huge and complex computing environment. Sun is now looking after a client/server infrastructure that supports all product development – high availability, high security, big CAD/CAM/CAE applications and hundreds of home grown specialist add-ons – with 3,500 full time users and 1,500 part time at two design centres and four plants. There are around 100 servers, mostly Sun – everything from small to very large – with around 2,000 Unix workstations, as well as X-Terminals for running BoMs and product data management, and a lot of PCs, both high end workstations and office desktops. The system accounts for about 20Tbytes of data, and there are interfaces to the Jaguar and Land Rover corporate infrastructures, with their enterprise applications and Ford’s own systems. With shrinking product cycles and over-capacity throughout the automotive industry forcing pressure on lead times and prices, not only are Land Rover and Jaguar increasingly dependent on every aspect of this system, but they are also increasingly vigilant on its costs. The decision to merge back offices of both in January was part of that, and Cadieux makes no secret of the challenges involved in wrestling with the different applications, cultures and expectations as they are brought together. As he says, Jaguar has been a well run ship for many years, but Land Rover has had “a more colourful history”. Beyond this, Ford’s own corporate IT strategy is on the move, with some outsourcing coming back inside – mirroring General Motors’ well publicised change of heart. And Ford is also re-evaluating several of its plethora of applications. This will be a very big deal. Land Rover, for example, has bespoke BoM PLM (product lifecycle management) systems that span and integrate engineering design and manufacturing production, similar in concept, but not in execution, to Ford-owned Volvo in Sweden. But Jaguar and Ford are EDS PLM shops, running separate engineering PDM and ERP systems. The cost/benefits analysis of changing the whole of Ford to, say, Land Rover’s implementation, with its ongoing support concerns, versus the packaged certainty (but arguably less efficient), will be a tough one to figure out. “We are very much customer-driven, providing service to our businesses,” observes Cadieux. “But there is a drive for common applications and business processes because commonality means a more efficient overall organisations. We’ll do things one way, rather than reinventing the wheel all the time – so we’ll cut costs that way too.” In the more immediate future, Jaguar will be going for server and storage consolidation, “reducing eight or nine onto Sun superservers”, says Cadieux. “I expect maintenance costs to fall again and more efficiency gains. We’re working with Sun to find more intelligent ways of going forward with our infrastructure.” That programme will be ongoing over the next few months and years as renewal cycles come up, starting with Jaguar and then moving on to Land Rover. Returning to the infrastructure service, Cadieux says his new ‘break/fix’ cover is better than before. He gets synchronised monitoring, improved preventative maintenance, better metrics, documented procedures and field change orders, and better resulting problem avoidance, as well as cost savings. He says it’s early days, but it’s already working well as Sun goes through its systems and seeks out potential problems and solutions. for example, Sun found one server which hadn’t been powered down since 1996. Engineers took it down over a weekend and, with new disks at the ready, had it up and fully available for the working week. “It’s a whole different way of managing costs,” he says, and he adds that the SLAs agreed allow the two companies to “work it out as we go”. Inevitably, with the cultural and IT differences between Jaguar and Land Rover, there will be ongoing negotiations – although budgets will merge. Asked whether he sees expansion of the outsourcing concept beyond the tried and tested, he said not. Although changes in the IT services landscape might warrant a revisit in the future, for now, “We’re fixing the basics first,” he says. “When we decide on new applications there will be an opportunity to look at different service offerings.”