Ford CEO Alan Mulally said Friday he plans to merge Ford’s regional divisions and brands into a single global operation similar to that of Toyota , reports the Detroit News. Mulally has a great admiration for Toyota’s business model, and hopes something similar can be applied at Ford.
“There’s not one Ford . There’s Ford of North America, there’s Ford of South America, there’s probably three Fords that make up Ford of Europe. There’s Australia. There’s China, India — there’s a lot of Fords, and they’re operated very separately as business units,” Mulally said. “We’ve got to go from where we are to leverage our global assets to compete as one company going forward.”
At Boeing, one of Mulally key strategies was reducing the company’s portfolio of more than a dozen airplanes to four. Mulally hopes to use a similar strategy at Ford, sharing more cars globally rather than having multiple vehicles doing virtually the same thing, only in different markets.
