Teri Takai, Director of supply chain systems contemplate recommendations to senior executives. The questions asked extremely important to Ford’s future:
How should the company use:
emerging information technologies (i.e. Internet technologies)?
ideas from new high-tech industries to change the way it interacted with suppliers?
Some argued that the new technology made it inevitable that entirely new business models would prevail
Ford needed to radically redesign its supply chain and other activities or risk being left behind
favored “virtual integration”
modeling the Ford supply chain on that of companies, such as Dell
Another group was more cautious, believing that the difference between the auto business and relatively newer businesses
(i.e., computer manufacturing) were important and substantive
Ford supplier network had many more layers and companies
Purchasing organization played a more prominent and independent role than had Dell’s