Brentwood, Essex-based Ford of Europe has been demonstrating its Ford Net CDX, a CAD/CAM data exchange system which allows external users to enter Ford’s private wide area network. The ISDN network represents a UKP31m investment by Ford and has been implemented to cut the time between the initial design of a vehicle and its production to keep a competitive edge. Ford has been encouraging its suppliers to link into the network so they can make contributions early on in the design process. At present there are 116 external suppliers connected to Ford Net CDX, of which 42 are in the UK. The firm hopes to have 800 suppliers in all, linked to the system by the year end. Ford sites both within the UK and abroad are linked by 2Mbps leased lines. Transparent through connection at 1.984Mbps enables transmission of 31 channels for 30 voice or data channels with 64 Kilobits per second each. The user dials into the network via the public ISDN network. Siemens AG provides the Bintec ISI board that connects the public network to the Ford network and the ISI Gate that acts as the exchange and interfaces the public network into the private Ford network. The supplier workstation has an Internet address allocated by Ford. To maintain security, calls from predefined ISDN circuits only are allowed and each supplier can only access its own electronic mail address. The Ford engineer can then access the mailbox of the supplier, on notification that there is a message by a telephone call from the supplier to the engineer. The engineer will then transfer the information to his workstation, can work on it and send back the information for the supplier to view. This whole process can take as little as three minutes at an average cost of 50 pence a file, compared to the two to five days it used to take sending information on magnetic tapes through the postal system at the end of the 1980s. In this way on going dialogue between Ford and suppliers is possible and the design process is enhanced. Currently 25 of the 116 suppliers linked to the network use ISDN and the rest use X25. The main hardware supplier terminals being used are Sun Microsystems Inc workstations. The wide area network also carries speech, facsimile and video conferencing data.
