Assembling
a top-of-the-line Web services model
Ford Credit wins Network World's 2002 E-comm Innovator Award
with an open-standards infrastructure that saves the company
carloads of money.
By Beth Schultz
Network
World, 02/18/02
When you provide online financial services to 12,500 automotive dealerships and 10 million car buyers worldwide, you'd better make sure your e-commerce infrastructure is in mint condition. Everything from application development to server setup must be hardened against dents.
Ford Credit, the largest automotive financing company in the world, has spent the last three years working toward such a pristine e-commerce infrastructure. In the process, it has Webified scores of applications built to run in a legacy OS/2, C++ client/server and COBOL mainframe environment.
Today, Ford Credit depends on BEA Systems' WebLogic application server software, Sun Enterprise network servers and Sun's Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) - an open-standards technology choice that has supercharged the company. A Web services model of J2EE-based reusable code roughly halves the time it takes to develop applications while saving Ford Credit millions of dollars, e-commerce managers at the company report.
Ford Credit customers - car buyers and dealers - are reaping benefits, too. They have gained real-time access to account information, payment systems and loan application processing through the business-to-business and consumer e-commerce applications developed in this new environment.
Those applications include CreditWeb, through which dealers can enter and transmit credit applications and transfer funds to credit offices, and the Used Vehicle Information System (UVIS), which lets external auctions and shipping companies facilitate the pick-up, sale and transportation of used vehicles in which Ford Motor and Ford Credit have a financial interest.
Ford Credit wins our 2002 E-comm Innovator Award for the ongoing development of this open e-commerce infrastructure, the compelling e-business applications that run on top of it, the savings being generated and the company's technology influence at its parent, Ford Motor.
Golden code
Today, three years into Ford Credit's J2EE work, a group of 12 developers and integration specialists have created 23 frameworks or Web services for reuse by IT's business unit application development teams, says Terry Bone, manager of e-commerce framework and architecture at Ford Credit. A framework is a structured architecture that enforces a standard or sequence of actions, while a service is a stand-alone but customizable enterprise component, Bone explains. Bone and his developers focus on the core infrastructure processes, writing what is typically very complex code. Application developers get to concentrate on critical business processes rather than on the underlying plumbing and communications connections.
One framework Bone's group developed runs server-side
applications via the WebLogic application server software,
processing HTTP requests. Another lets Ford Credit applications
leverage legacy mainframe programs. This framework supports
LU 6.2 and TCP/IP protocols, and encapsulates technical details
such as data marshaling, client/peer conversations and multisegmented
messages, Bone says.
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Network
World's annual E-comm Innovator Award is granted
to enterprises that have completed extraordinary
e-commerce initiatives. This year, we honor Ford
Credit, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ford Motor,
for building an open-standards e-commerce infrastructure
that saves the company millions of dollars annually
in application development costs. With this infrastructure,
the company has Webified dozens of legacy applications
and given 10 million car buyers and 12,500 Ford
dealers worldwide instant access to the financial
information they need to buy and sell cars.
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Because Bone's team takes on the tough engineering problems, the business unit developers can deliver high-quality applications in a much shorter time, says Jeff Lemmer, e-commerce technology director for Ford Credit, in Dearborn, Mich. And that means they can produce more applications. "And I'm not talking about small, one-off applications, either," he adds.
CreditWeb, UVIS and other applications built using these frameworks and services are fueling Ford Credit's business today. With penetration in about 35% of dealerships, CreditWeb processes 250,000 credit applications monthly, Bone says.
And UVIS supports hundreds of concurrent users, handling transactions for more than 100,000 cars per month. Gross sales top $13 billion annually, Bone says. The application shortens vehicle processing time by providing real-time system updates during the day and reducing the nightly batch update cycle by 80%. The modular design provides flexibility for quick response to expanding global business needs, at a significant reduction in support costs, he adds.
By creating these frameworks, his group has saved Ford Credit $15.5 million over the past two and a half years, Bone figures.
Bone calculated these savings by first investigating which J2EE frameworks and services application developers have taken advantage of, and then assessing the total cost of ownership of those components - $2 million to develop and another half-million dollars on maintenance and enhancements. Next, he factored in the cost of reuse.
"We came to understand that reusing frameworks comes at a cost,"
Bone says. "You can't give application developers a framework
and expect them to use that for free. They have to learn and
understand it to be proficient enough to get value."
Bone engaged Sun's help in calculating return on investment. After Sun examined reuse instances of commercial, shareware and internally developed code, it determined that application developers learn the reusable code in 20% of the code's development time. So, if a framework took a month to develop, application developers would become proficient with it in one week, Bone explains.
Lastly, Bone factored in the level of reuse. "Not everything we produce is 100% reusable," he notes. Sometimes an application development team will use all of a service, or maybe just 20% of it, he says.
Taking all these factors into account, Bone determined that major application development projects save an estimated $750,000 by reusing a subset of the frameworks and services.
Reuse, Part II
This year, Bone's developers plan on revving up their Web services efforts even further by extending a project launched in 2001 called Pinnacle. Through Pinnacle, Ford Credit is Webifying loan origination, processing and accounts servicing applications, migrating 5,000 branch office and service center clients from OS/2 to the J2EE platform. This will move them from "very fat" clients to browser applications. This will give Ford Credit needed flexibility in dealing with workers. "We'll be able to support changes in the business environment - for work at home, remote access and laptop utilization," Bone says.
Lemmer says Pinnacle is "one of, if not the largest, client/server application within Ford Credit and all of Ford Motor. It's at the heart of the IT infrastructure within Ford Credit."
The J2EE frameworks have been domain-neutral in their focus on solving technically complex service-level problems. But the account-servicing portion of the Pinnacle project is a collection of nine applications that share common characteristics. These commonalties give Bone's group the opportunity to develop application domain reusable code. Bone expects similar development efficiencies and cost savings from this type of reusable service.
In another big 2001 project, Ford Credit upgraded its WebLogic application server software from Version 4.51 to Version 6.1. Bone and his group updated the J2EE frameworks and services, leaving only regression testing for the application development teams. Each team took between two and three weeks to migrate and test their applications, Bone says. "This showed that if applications are developed on top of a common framework and architecture the migration could be very painless. The only thing the application developers experienced was improved performance," he adds.
Transaction-completion times immediately dropped from about 4 seconds to 1 second for Workflow, an intranet application that thousands of Ford Credit customer service representatives use, Bone says. Meanwhile, CPU utilization of the Workflow application servers fell to less than 50% from a worrisome 80%. Because of the WebLogic upgrade, Workflow developers were among several groups that shelved plans for hardware upgrades, Bone says.
To the Nth degree
Still, hardware upgrades will come as Ford
Credit strives this year to create a more robust network server
environment, says Scott Klevorn, technical specialist with
Ford Credit's technical infrastructure department.
Currently, 24 Sun Enterprise 4500 and 6500 servers in two Ford Motor data centers in Dearborn support 17 e-commerce and six other business applications, he says. The servers run the Solaris 6 operating system. (Ford Credit pays the Ford Motor data center team to maintain the servers and other network equipment, such as firewalls, routers and load-balancing modules, Klevorn says.)
Under today's procedures, the application architecture is tightly controlled and managed, but application development and production environments are not. Applications have always gotten the computing resources they need, but at the price of server sprawl, Klevorn says.
Now, "everyone has agreed to throw all the servers in a pot" so the technical infrastructure group can improve server utilization, Klevorn says. He credits the buy-in in large part to Lemmer's advocacy of the idea.
Lemmer says this of the server plans: "Just as we're getting people to reuse software components, we're attempting to get them to reuse hardware components, too."
Because of the server consolidation, Klevorn anticipates being able to provide application teams with higher service-level agreements (SLA) and save money at the same time. Today, most applications get an SLA Level 3, which promises 98% uptime. Under the new architecture, they'll get bumped to SLA Level 2, for guaranteed 99.2% uptime, for a lower cost than the SLA 3 fee.
The server consolidation plan will begin shortly, as leases on seven of the 24 Enterprise servers expire by July. Klevorn plans on replacing those outgoing servers with Sun's newer SunFire models. He'll bring in two SunFire 6800s, which he says will support application growth through 2002.
To ensure applications get the resources they need, Klevorn will separate them by chassis or, when necessary, create static domains for them. "For the most part though, we're betting the farm on Solaris Resource Manager," Klevorn says.
Unlike their Enterprise predecessors, the SunFire servers can handle multiple operating system installations on the same hardware chassis, he explains. Ford Credit has just started migrating to Solaris 8, the minimum operating system level supported by the SunFire line, Klevorn notes.
For storage, applications will get their own disk volumes or will be assigned quotas on shared disk volumes, depending on their size, he says.
Coincident with the server consolidation, Klevorn and Bone are working on establishing a common process for moving an application from the development to production environment. Knowing that all applications have gone through the same load testing and other quality assurance steps provide developers an insurance policy, Klevorn says.
Klevorn has budgeted a large portion of Ford Credit's server infrastructure budget for the server consolidation. His goal is to keep hardware expenses flat, at a minimum, while accommodating growth for Pinnacle and other applications. Currently, $2.7 million worth of server CPU and RAM run on the data center floor, Klevorn adds.
Reuse, Part III
On the client side, Ford Credit plans to add wireless Web access this year. For an electronic vehicle condition project, developers are creating a Java and C++ application for a handheld device. Dealers will scan the Vehicle Identification Number and complete a checklist. They'll transfer the data into the back-end system either by synchronizing it or via a wireless connection. Bone expects the quality and timeliness of vehicle condition reports, now completed on paper and faxed for manual input, to improve significantly. And he expects vehicles to be turned over quicker for auction, so dealers will get paid faster.
The wireless developments serve as another example of code reuse, this time through the Java 2 Platform Micro Edition specification, Bone says.
Lemmer has budgeted approximately 20% of his budget for e-commerce component projects such as this that will get under way in 2002. Some of those funds are earmarked for work on broader Web services. Bone says Ford Credit sees the opportunity to create a generic XML-based portal for credit applications, for example.
The notable benefits and cost savings borne out of Ford Credit's e-commerce open infrastructure have garnered attention throughout the company. "Terry's group is a catalyst for technology evolution within Ford Credit. What comes out of his group feeds across the rest of the organization," Lemmer says.
The Microsoft-centric Ford Motor has even set up a J2EE Center of Excellence, says Lemmer, who took on a special 90-day assignment to help launch it. As early adopters of J2EE technology, Bone and Lemmer talk regularly with managers at the center. "Being a fairly mature J2EE organization at Ford Credit, we can share our experiences," Bone says. "We've made a lot of mistakes over time, and we want to make sure they don't run into the same pitfalls."
Indeed, Ford Credit has built a top-of-the-line Web services model.
Related links
Contact Signature Series Editor Beth Schultz
2001 E-comm
Innovator Award winner, ABF Freight System
2001
E-comm Innovator Award honorable mentions
2000 E-comm
Innovator Award winner, Sigma-Aldrich
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