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November 30, 1998

Harley Shifts Into Higher Gear

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Information Sharing Boosts IT's Value

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At least one person close to the company says Harley-Davidson's management structure contributes to its conservative approach. "Their hearts and minds are in the right place, but because they have such a decentralized organizational structure, it's harder for them to get consensus on a lot of applications," says Chris Davidson, regional manager at DataMirror Corp., a Toronto maker of data transformation and replication software and one of Harley-Davidson's IT suppliers. "In some respects, it's slower," Mason acknowledges, "because you have to bring all the stakeholders together."

Harley-Davidson uses DataMirror Transformation Server and the DataMirror High Availability Suite to move data, such as information on inventory levels, among the AS/400s running its manufacturing systems. The company also uses the software to move warranty and parts information between its main manufacturing system and its Web server supporting H-D.Net.

According to DataMirror's Davidson, Harley-Davidson is aggressively standardizing its IT systems. The by-product of that, he says, will be a more nimble IT shop. "Harley-Davidson sees the need to streamline operations and reduce the expense of supporting multiple products," he says.

The list of IT vendors wasn't the only one to be simplified. In 1995, Garry Berryman was recruited from Honda to serve as VP of purchasing. Berryman began strategically weeding suppliers from the nearly 1,000 that provided Harley-Davidson with motorcycle components, parts, and accessories, as well as general merchandise. The number of suppliers was cut to 425, and Sterling Software's E-commerce application was implemented to streamline the company's $1 billion in annual spending with suppliers. Berryman also worked with IT to deploy Marcam's Advantis software to help manage the inventory and requirements for maintenance, repair, and operations supplies provided by 2,000 suppliers at a cost of $70 million a year.

"Harley-Davidson is capacity-strained," says Bill Swanton, VP and service director for manufacturing strategy at AMR Research Inc. "To the extent they can get better relations with their suppliers, the more successful they can be."

The purchasing strategy and IT deployments, carried out within his first year at Harley-Davidson, paid off in productivity and efficiency, says Berryman. Despite the continued rapid growth of the company, he explains, no additional purchasing staff has been necessary.

Room To Grow
Using IT to make its spending and supplier relationships as efficient and effective as possible is essential for maintaining growth. "We've got to have good information, or we cannot grow at projected rates," says Berryman.

That's why Harley-Davidson continues to enhance its supply chain. In addition to Manugistics' supply-chain software, Harley-Davidson has acquired licenses for Parametric's Pro-E computer-aided design and manufacturing software to support more than 5,000 users, both internally and among its motorcycle component suppliers. The company also acquired Metaphase's product-data management software, to streamline the flow of product information internally and externally.

Recently, Harley-Davidson completed rollout of a custom Web-browser interface, developed using Metaphase's Java-based eVista toolkit, to its 400 Unix workstations at eight locations. The browsers can be used to search current and historical parts drawings, which are batch-loaded from the company's ProE CAD systems to a Metaphase data vault running on an Oracle database.

The data vault and browser interface system--which will be rolled out next spring to Windows 95 machines used by purchasing, inspection, manufacturing, and dealer support--replaces a "clunky manual" process of overnighting every new drawing throughout the company, says Mark Dickson, a systems manager for product development applications at Harley-Davidson. Because the manual process was slow, users were never sure if they had the latest version of a drawing, says Dickson. "The beauty of what we're doing is that Metaphase lets those without CAD workstations have access to the drawings," he says.

Metaphase's product-data management tools may play an even larger role in the near future, Dickson adds. "We have expectations for PDM to be the control point for product- and process-related data, including bills of material, to the extent we need to build bridges to [American Software]," he says.

With the addition of password protection and other security, access to drawings will be extended to parts suppliers, which will also be given ProE CAD licenses. These steps open Harley-Davidson's suppliers to collaborative relationships that will cut product development time and manufacturing costs to the tune of $40 million, the company hopes.