The Role of PLM in Lean Product Creation Chris Theodore Vice President, Advanced Product Creation Ford Motor Company   March  19,2004  - EECS 1500 2:00pm - 3:00pm
BIOGRAPHY:  CHRIS P. THEODORE Chris Theodore is Vice President, Advanced Product Creation, Ford Motor Company.  His role includes: creating a strategic design vision for Ford, Lincoln and Mercury products and brands; developing new products and features; bringing together technology, marketing and trends with concepts and show vehicles; and facilitating a stable cycle plan and platform selections. Theodore is also responsible for the Ford Performance Group, including SVT, and Ford Motor Company’s advanced product activities throughout North America. Previously, Theodore was vice president of Ford North America Product Development, responsible for the design, engineering and development of all Ford cars and light trucks sold in North America. Theodore has a 32-year career with vast experiences in the automotive industry including Ford, General Motors and Daimler Chrysler. Theodore left Daimler-Chrysler as Senior Vice President of Platform Engineering in 1999 having led the development of the second-generation Chrysler mini-van, the Neon and PT Cruiser.  Theodore returned to Ford as vice president, Ford North America Car in 1999, where he worked to re-energize the car market with the introduction of the legendary Thunderbird.  In addition to Thunderbird, Theodore oversaw ongoing product development of the Ford passenger cars and Ford's forthcoming barrage of 2005 product including the 500, Freestyle, Mustang and Ford GT Super car.
Enterprise-Level Integration:     It's Not About Technology    Dr. Michael L. Brodie     Chief Scientist     Verizon Communications     Information Technology     November 11, 2003, Dow 1014     2:00pm - 3:00pm
Abstract : To further automate processes and to cooperate between systems within an enterprise previously disjoint processes, functions, or databases must be integrated to some degree. Within the boundaries and enterprise, the enterprise has a degree of control over the integration. Cooperation between enterprises requires agreements to enforce integration or interoperation standards from the business process level down. When the number of partners increases, e.g., Wal-Mart’s 5,000 suppliers, the problem gets even greater. There are thousands of solutions to address the integration of large “legacy” applications including replacing them with Commercial Off The Shelf systems, e.g., ERP systems like SAP, with built in integration and interoperation solutions for specific domains such as supply chain management. Most integration solutions augment “legacy” applications or technologies to do things that they were not designed to do – cooperate with other systems. Over the past two decades there has been a push towards architectures and technologies based on “cooperation” down to the lowest level. In service oriented architectures the capabilities provided by what we currently call “applications” will be provided by services – core or basic services which can then be composed into higher level services, all invoked via workflows or business processes. This talk will present a large-scale enterprise as a concrete context in which all the above challenges arise including the business context as well as the integration challenges and solutions attempted over time up to the current investigations into Web Services.

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