Ford Motor Company announced yesterday the integration of North Plains’ Telescope digital asset management service (DAM). TeleScope is designed to help companies like Ford to streamline the creation and distribution of global and local media assets. Telescope will enable Ford to greatly improve media and digital information across their vast corporate network.
Update: Ford Motor Company’s and North Plains’ collaboration does in fact not involve the Telescope Publishing Platform (TPP) as we previously reported. This is a separate product, with a different scope and overall purpose from “TeleScope”, which is purely a digital asset management platform (DAM). The distinction has been corrected throughout this article where it reflects on this business activity.
According to this news from Ford, the company is moving rapidly forward with a line of new products designed and developed to meet the universal needs of global customers. As part of Ford’s ONE Ford initiative, this move is one step toward consistency and efficiency in all aspects of corporate digital assets for products in diversified regions and markets worldwide. This “unified” approach to corporate operational efficiency where digital media and assets are concerned, is one of many much needed global branding and dispersion steps companies need in the digital world.
One new product, for instance, Ford’s new Focus, will be sold in some 122 markets worldwide. Ford, or any company dealing in extended markets, needs tools that allow for a “collective” approach in finding, refining, and distributing digital media and data worldwide. With North Plains’ TeleScope, Ford managers and employees can now find, manage, share, distribute and collaborate on product photos, videos, graphics and other related digital media files – across the spectrum of the company’s more than 2000 team members on its North America, Europe, and Asia.
Integrated asset management is not a new idea, but very refined tools like the modular TeleScope software are just now coming into their own in allowing simplicity of use, while affording uniformity, and broad solutions for digital media distribution and management.
The Rub
Hassan Kotob, President and CEO, North Plains Systems, Inc had this to say about Ford’s decision to team up with North Plains:
“As companies change to meet the demands of selling and communicating to a global marketplace, they need systems like TeleScope to facilitate those efforts. We look forward to working together and helping to make Ford an increasingly efficient global company.”
Elena Ford, director of global marketing for Ford Motor Company, suggested that the decision to go with North Plains was a collective decision made by Ford’s marketing teams from around the world. Ford’s commitment to the “One Ford” initiative seems like a viable and appropriate step toward taking the company into the digital realm in the 21st Century to us. Collaboration, uniformity, best practices and especially refined uses for emerging technologies will be the differentiators for many traditional businesses. We have said this many times.
Ford, in raising the bar in committing to digital asset management in such a way. Having taken a bold step here, integrating with the right tools to consolidate innovative ideas and the ways in which those ideas reach the overall network at Ford, being able to finely tune and manage them, is obviously good news for Ford and North Plains.