Richard RiffRichard Riff
Henry Ford Technical Fellow, Virtual Product Creation & PLM
Ford Motor Company

Dr. Richard Riff, Director, is a Henry Ford Technical Fellow, Virtual Product Creation (VPC) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)—one of five Technical Fellows at Ford today.

An internationally-recognized authority in the field of computer-aided design, manufacturing, engineering (CAD-CAM-CAE) and PLM, Dr. Riff leads a team of technical experts focused on Ford's global, enterprise-wide strategies for advanced processes, methods, information and tools/technologies within the virtual product creation (development), analysis, manufacturing and PLM domains. PLM at Ford is defined as the management of information, processes, people and applications used from the inception of a product through the end of its life. The objective is to bring these disciplines together to create an environment that enables the creation, maintenance, access and retirement of product data, and extends across traditional boundaries of product development, manufacturing and service, as well as across brands, continents and cultures.

The role of Ford's Technical Fellows is to provide understandable, technically sound advice to the chief technical officer and to the company as a whole, influencing strategic direction on key product and process matters, contributing to corporate technical strategies, using competitive benchmarking to analyze and improve products, technologies and processes, and ensuring the transfer of knowledge across organizations and the continued growth of the company's in-house expertise.

Formerly the director of the C3P project office, Dr. Riff led the development and implementation of Ford's C3P—CAD-CAM-CAE and Product Information Management (PIM) strategy, another global, cross-functional enabler involving major changes in Ford's processes, methods, tools, architecture and infrastructure. In 1998, he received the company's most prestigious technical award, becoming a Henry Ford Technical Fellow for his work on Ford's C3P strategy.

Dr. Riff joined Ford Motor Company in 1989 as a CAE technical specialist, for Automotive Parts Operations Electronics Division. Before coming to Ford, he was professor of aerospace structures at Georgia Technological University in Atlanta, Georgia, and at Technion Institute of Technology in Israel, where he received a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in aeronautic and mechanical engineering. He has authored more than seventy technical publications and several books in his areas of specialization, including C3P, structural and dynamic Finite Element Analysis (FEA), pre and post-processors, descriptive geometry and material constitutive laws.