Microsoft, IBM address carmaker needs

DETROIT – At last week’s Auto-Tech Conference, Microsoft and IBM separately pitched technology ideas as a palliative for the profit-hungry auto industry.

Microsoft proposed that car manufacturers deploy RFID tags on shipments of auto parts to factories, on plant floors and in vehicles to automatically pick up pricing, warranty and customer data using RFID readers. As it happens, Microsoft is quietly getting into RFID by outfitting the Microsoft BizTalk Server to collect RFID data from readers, with Ford as the beta customer.

“At Ford, RFID tags placed on tractor trailers coming in at one facility have eliminated 40 man-hours of time per day,” said Kyle Solomon, automotive industry manager at Microsoft.

Microsoft last year set up a division to design RFID-based software that is now being tested by RFID reader manufacturers such as InterMec, Siemens, Symbol Technologies and TechLogic.

IBM, meanwhile, is putting automation technology to work for carmakers looking to streamline the process of pinpointing car components not performing up to expectation or that might have to be recalled for safety reasons.

Warranty claims cost the U.S. auto industry $14 billion per year, according to Jan Beauchamp, IBM’s general manager of global automotive industry. “For the average vehicle, this is $700,” Beauchamp says.

Beauchamp says most analysis to determine deficiencies is done manually by bringing together dealers’ trouble reports, manufacturers’ bulletins and other sources to manually analyze the data to determine where problems might lie, she says. Often this can take months, which means cars might be sent off production lines with parts that could have been improved if more had been known earlier.

To speed the analysis process through automation, IBM developed what it says is experimental technology called Quality Insight that can combine unstructured and text data not only from carmakers’ back-end databases, but also from online discussion forums, such as chat rooms or blogs, where the first inklings of discontent might be expressed by car owners.

International Truck and Engine helped IBM with the software design and tested it for 18 months. The package pulls together IBM’s WebSphere, DB2 Content Manager, Integrator OmniFind Edition and the Unstructured Information Management Architecture with a specialized dictionary for the auto industry that IBM developed specific to automotive problems. It appears able to take weeks off the analysis process. IBM plans similar versions for other industries, including aerospace, defense and electronics.