(Bloomberg) — Ford Motor Co. took an unusually humane approach to fixing its persistent quality problems: It brought back what it calls “graybeard” engineers to help train younger professionals and reprogram artificial intelligence tools that weren’t getting the job done.
Over the past three years, Ford says it has hired 350 veteran engineers, many of them former employees and others from suppliers, to help tackle seemingly intractable quality problems that have cost the automaker billions of dollars. The result: Ford is the best-ranked generalist brand in the most recent Initial Quality Surveyfrom JD Power, released this Thursday.
“Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it is only as good as the information used to train it,” Charles Poon, vice president of vehicle hardware engineering at Ford, told reporters on a conference call Wednesday. “In recent years, we have not paid as much attention as we should to the expertise of our most qualified engineers, who have been with us through many product cycles.”
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These engineers were “at the heart” of Ford’s efforts to turn around quality problems, said Kumar Galhotra, the company’s chief operating officer. Now, they run mandatory meetings to rigorously analyze quality failures and have reprogrammed AI tools to prevent defects before they even happen.
“We were relying more and more on automated quality systems” and not getting the desired results, Galhotra said. “We brought back technical experts” and “they look for points of failure before a part even reaches the production line.”
The return of veteran engineers to Ford goes against the consensus — and fear — that AI will replace all types of knowledge workers. But Ford discovered that machines could not replace experience.
“We mistakenly thought that all we needed to do was introduce artificial intelligence and feed it into the design requirements we already had to get a high-quality product,” said Poon. But, according to him, the company recognized that, to improve its automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence tools, it was necessary to ensure that they were trained by the most experienced people.
As a result of the work of these veterans, Ford has surpassed historical benchmarks in quality, such as Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co., in JD Power’s benchmark survey, which measures the quality of a car during the first three months of ownership. This year, only luxury brands Porsche and Genesis were ahead of Ford.
Porsche, Genesis and Ford lead in initial quality | Infiniti and VW do poorly in annual JD Power study
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In last year’s survey, Ford ranked 10th among generalist brands, with quality below the sector average. The improvement recorded this year was the largest among comparable brands.
Three Ford models — the F-150 pickup truck, the Super Duty truck and the Mustang sports car — came first in their respective categories in the JD Power survey.
Despite the good performance, Ford remains the automaker with the most recalls in the United States, and the company has already said it expects $1 billion in warranty and materials costs this year. Galhotra said the recalls are a “lagging indicator” of Ford’s quality and he expects to see fewer cases in the future.
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“As we are doing more to prevent problems from the beginning, we believe these recall numbers will drop consistently with newer vehicles,” Galhotra said. “I can’t give a very specific date for when this turning point will happen.”
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