Ford Motor Co. has entered into a strategic alliance with United Parcel Service (UPS), creating a new joint venture which will manage Ford’s North American delivery network. The partnership will include the development of a new system to track vehicles being shipped in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico for all customers, including fleet deliveries.

The new venture will be called UPS Autogistics, and it will re-engineer Ford’s transportation network to optimize speed and accuracy in the shipment of all Ford products. It will track the vehicles in much the same way as UPS tracks its packages, using barcodes and the Internet. The tracking system is expected to reduce bottlenecks and allow for quick alternatives to solve unexpected problems. Ford and Lincoln Mercury dealerships, and ultimately fleet customers, will be able to log onto a website to locate the current position of their vehicles in the delivery system.

UPS Autogistics will have 120 employees, with 80 of those being field personnel. Heading up the venture will be UPS Vice President and General Manager Denny Barts, who will be headquartered in Atlanta.

Plan to Proceed in Phases

According to Thomas Kolakowski, North American Vehicle Logistics manager for Ford, the new venture will be implemented in five phases. Initially, UPS Autogistics personnel will use the existing Ford logistics system, with the addition of barcode scans at specific transit points to input shipment information for tracking purposes. These transit points might include, for example, when vehicles first leave the factory, are loaded onto a truck carrier, are loaded and off-loaded onto a rail car, and are delivered to a dealer. In the beginning, the tracking will use existing Ford systems.

As the plan progresses, carriers will input information directly into UPS’ system. This will serve as a transitional phase, leading to the introduction of an entirely new Ford tracking system, which will allow dealer and fleet customer access to tracking information. The program is scheduled to be completed by mid-2001, when shipments from all plants to all destinations will be tracked. An important consideration is keeping the information relevant. “We don’t want to overload customers with too much information they don’t really need. We want to maintain a delicate balance between accuracy and brevity,” Kolakowski said.

Phases Add Plants, Destinations

The initial phase, scheduled for March 2000, will track vehicle shipments from seven plants. These will include St. Louis (Explorer), Kansas City (F-150), as well as five Michigan plants: Wayne (Focus); Wixon (Lincoln); Michigan Truck Assembly (Expedition and Navigator); Dearborn (Mustang); and Flat Rock (Cougar).

Under the first phase, the UPS Autogistics team will track shipments from these factories to destinations in the West and Southwest U.S., from California to Texas.

“We chose to begin rollout with these regions because of the long distances involved. Making improvements in long transits will have a residual effect on other shipments,” Kolakowski explained.

Phase 2 will add plants in Louis- ville (Excursion, Sport Trac) and the Kentucky Truck Assembly (Excursion/F-Series trucks), and the nine plants cumulatively included will expand shipment tracking to destinations in the Southeast. After the second phase, the sequence in which other plants are added to the tracking program will be determined upon analyzing the results of the first two phases.

Phase 3 begins after plant shutdown in mid-July 2000, and Phase 4 will commence in September/October 2000. The final phase will begin in mid-January 2001.

 According to Kolakowski, the key to improving order-to-delivery times will be the field personnel UPS Autogistics will station at transit points, most of whom will bring experience with UPS into the new venture. “The field personnel will monitor the progress of vehicles from designated shipping hubs, and will compare that progress with the shipping schedule. They will be the ones to ensure that vehicles are moving, not sitting in rail yards,” he said. “The field personnel will try to get the vehicle, or at the very least alert the next transit point to the delay.”

Ford is the third major company to contract the services of the UPS Logistics Group, which has been in business for five years. Nike uses UPS to fulfill its online orders, and DaimlerChrysler received its help in updating the parts ordering system used by dealers.