InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
December 6, 1999
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And that is.... Dave Bent, Master Builder
Dave Bent is building Visteon into an E-business to be reckoned with
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ave Bent is talking about his house. Not his home in Ann Arbor, Mich., but a construction effort he's leading at work, a new structure he's engineering to transform his company into an E-business. Bent, CIO of Visteon Automotive Systems, the $18 billion auto-parts business unit of Ford Motor Co., calls it "The House of eVisteon." Bent is InformationWeek's Chief of the Year for 1999 because of his House of eVisteon vision for transforming a brick-and-mortar company into an E-business powerhouse. He's also being recognized for his leadership in helping Visteon make the transition to an independent company, his aggressive use of Internet and E-business technologies to attract new customers and work more effectively with suppliers, and his efforts in defining and serving new markets for Visteon."I can't stop thinking of things being built like houses or bridges," Bent says. That's no surprise, given Bent's education and training as a civil engineer. The foundation of the House of eVisteon--its "E-infrastructure"--is made up of 27,000 PCs, 3,000 workstations, and an integrated system of WANs and LANs that employs a large number of Windows NT servers supporting the company's front-office systems, along with high-end servers from Sun Microsystems running Visteon's enterprise applications. Bent and his team recently completed an 18-month project to migrate 20,000 Visteon users off Ford's IBM Profs E-mail system to Visteon's Microsoft Exchange system.
The roof of the House is made up of database and data-management systems--what Bent refers to as "E-management." Visteon is working with enterprise software vendor SAP to employ its Business Warehouse data gathering and analysis technology. Bent says Visteon is also looking to evolve its database architecture into a highly integrated data set that will provide data access throughout the company, as well as act as a "cockpit" for management data and decisions. In between, framing the structure, are Visteon's E-business processes with suppliers and customers. Those processes stretch across the supply chain, to enterprise applications and to direct customer interaction. That's where the bulk of the activity is happening now and will happen over the next year--and the main facilitator of this is the Internet.
Bent says the Internet can open the doors to customers and suppliers who never before had access to Visteon, whether they're consumers or business users. That broader reach means higher revenue. "Growth is the name of the game," he says. "IT is the catalyst to transform Visteon into an E-business."
Bent, 39, is a 17-year veteran of Ford. A native of Nantwich Cheshire, England, Bent started at Ford as a computer-aided engineering systems analyst in product development at Ford's operations in Dunton, in the United Kingdom. While there, he became involved with a software-engineering project to develop electronic engine-control modules. In 1986, he moved to Ford's corporate design office in Cologne, Germany, for an assignment that was supposed to last a year. He ended up staying in Ford's German operations for 11 years, until his move to the United States in 1997.
Bent came to Visteon when Ford created the auto-parts business unit. He's been the head of Visteon's IT division for the last two years, with a succession of titles including, most recently, director of enterprise processes and systems. Bent was promoted to CIO in February.
Since coming to the United States, Bent has helped lead Visteon in developing a plan to increase sales of its aftermarket products--from replacement parts to sound systems--to dealers and consumers. He's also been instrumental in forging a strategy to increase sales of Visteon's more complex integrated systems, such as fuel-injection systems and car interiors, to Ford companies such as Volvo and Lincoln Mercury but also--and more significantly--to rival automakers such as DaimlerChrysler and BMW. Bent has been a leader in using the Internet to effectively and efficiently deal with suppliers to drive down supply costs.
Fundamental to Visteon's growth is Ford's plan to spin off the auto-parts company. That will make Visteon more independent, more agile, and ultimately more attractive as a parts supplier to non-Ford automakers. "If you're BMW, are you prepared to share your interior design with a Ford business?" asks Alex Preston, Visteon's VP of supply and process leadership and Bent's boss.
But breaking away from Ford also means breaking away from Ford's complicated IT operations--everything from back-office applications such as financial systems to complex manufacturing systems. "Cutting the umbilical cord to Ford is a gargantuan task," says Preston. "We have to replace every system." However, the transition offers opportunities for Visteon to change its business processes. "We don't have to inherit everything or do everything that Ford has done for 90 years," Preston says. "It's a clean slate."
Visteon is about a year into a four-year project to migrate support of its back-office business processes from Ford's IT systems to its own. During the last year or so, with Bent's guidance, Visteon has moved about 80% of applications related to its aftermarket operation onto SAP's R/3 enterprise resource planning software platform. The goal is to build Visteon's aftermarket sales from about $700 million this year to $2.5 billion in 2002.
continued...page 2, 3
Photos by Andrew Sacks
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