“The ALOM team have been great partners in successfully implementing the OpenXC Shop and establishing a great platform for managing our hardware inventory.”
Sudipto Aich, Director, Ford Research
Automotive
American automobile manufacturer is the second-largest U.S.-based automaker and the sixth-largest in the world.
Automobiles are fast becoming wirelessly-connected mobile supercomputers with advanced systems that monitor and control everything from fuel efficiency to navigation and entertainment. To foster innovation in connected car technology, researchers at Ford Motor Company joined with ALOM supply chain engineers to establish an application developer program for the OpenXC™ vehicle interface—and in so doing helped standardize a way to create aftermarket software and hardware for vehicles.
OpenXC is a combination of open-source hardware and software that extends a vehicle’s on-board electronic computer with custom applications and pluggable modules. It uses standard, well-known tools to open up a wealth of data from the vehicle to developers. Using OpenXC, developers can monitor many of the sensors on a vehicle, enabling new and innovative vehicle-centric applications.
The challenge for Ford was to build interest in the mobile application developer community towards investing in ‘connected car’ custom applications. The strategy to achieve this goal was to ‘seed’ the developer community with OpenXC developer kits to generate excitement and provide the tools and resources to accelerate innovation.
To begin, ALOM centralized the sourcing of developer kit components. Next, a customized process was implemented for serial number unit traceability throughout the supply chain—from the moment of manufacture to assembly, kitting, and fulfillment. At the same time, ALOM designed impactful and sustainable kit packaging. ALOM then built an eCommerce platform targeted at members of the developer community that seamlessly integrated with the OpenXC developer resource website to place developer kit online orders. ALOM shipped all orders within 24 hours of receipt.
To generate ongoing interest in OpenXC platform development, ALOM executed an email campaign targeted at the open-source developer community. The campaign resulted in record conversions to request OpenXC information and place developer kit orders.
To round out the complete turnkey solution, ALOM established an online OpenXC customer service portal for developers to monitor order status and receive access to programmer resources. To track orders and online activity, the ALOM e-commerce solution provided back-end data analytics and reporting tools to track and report metrics.
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