The customer: creating vehicles for every lifestyle

The Ford Motor Company (Ford) has been manufacturing cars since 1903. The second-largest automotive manufacturer in the USA, Ford is a Fortune 500 company and listed in the Ethisphere® Institute’s Top 100 Ethical Companies.

The challenge: safeguarding productivity for 10,000 users

To remain competitive, Ford is constantly innovating. The car manufacturer has around 20,000 active projects at any time, and uses Clarity PPM to track them.

With 10,000 users across the business, the solution must perform at optimum levels to safeguard project success and maximize efficiency.

When database, portlet, and configuration issues started to impact the user experience, leaving users frustrated and unable to quickly access the information they needed, Ford recognized that an experienced partner to help identify and rectify the problems was required.

The solution: analyzing performance and recommending improvements

Ford partnered with Rego Consulting to review its Clarity implementation. Rego’s PPM experts identified the root cause of the portlet issues, and recommended that filters be introduced. The team changed page configurations to only render with filters on, set default filters for the customer’s portlets, and advised the customer to contract for query tuning.

Based on performance analytics, Rego also discovered that original query design and execution were not running efficiently, and made suggestions to improve the way data was accessed, such as:
• Using precompiled sources and replacing ‘not in’ queries with ‘not exist’
• Using a stored procedure to populate a properly indexed reporting table and write the portlet query against that table
• Designing portlets and queries to enforce date range restrictions
• Avoiding nested sub-queries that return excessive data

The benefits: stabilized performance, improved productivity

Following implementation of the remediation activities suggested by Rego Consulting, long-running sessions that led to system issues have been eliminated and Ford’s Clarity users have seen improvements in portlet and reporting speed.

As a result, Ford has enhanced the efficiency of its project teams and increased their satisfaction levels.