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BY PATRICK WAURZYNIAK
Posted Feb. 24, 1997
Two years ago, the automotive
industry was heralded as the first major U.S. business
sector to make the shift from conducting business over traditional
value-added networks (VAN) to the Internet. With great fanfare,
the Big Three automakers -- General Motors
Corp., Ford Motor Co.
and Chrysler Corp. -- heralded
their ambitious plan to create a TCP/IP-based "unified industry
network," dubbed the Automotive Network Exchange (ANX).
Currently, the automakers communicate with their thousands of
suppliers using their own separate networks. Critical electronic data
interchange (EDI) and computer-aided design and manufacturing and
engineering (CAD/CAM/CAE) file transfers are often accomplished via
a myriad of
communications protocols.
The ANX, on the other hand, was designed to be a single, secure
network for electronic commerce and data transfer. As such, it
promised to assuage the industry's chronic design cycle problems by
allowing the Big Three to
collaborate in real time with their suppliers over secured areas of the
Internet.
Upon completion, the highest-performing portions of the ANX would
theoretically enable simultaneous engineering using multiple
workstations or X Window Systems graphics terminals to run finite element
analysis software, solid modeling CAD packages or even
high-speed prototyping with the fastest communications links. The
network will provide the bandwidth required, not just for CAD/CAM
but also for applications such as advanced videoconferencing and
three-dimensional virtual reality design sessions.
Hard Lessons
It hasn't been easy, however, to move a multibillion-dollar industry
off an established communications model and on to one where
standards for security and reliability are in ferment. Bureaucratic
roadblocks and snafus have also plagued the effort, as the various
factions struggle to agree on ANX's final format. Indeed, the past two
years provide an object lesson in moving an entire industry to
an Internet-based data communications environment.
Consider that the ANX was first conceived in 1994 by the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG), a
Southfield, Mich.-based consortium of OEMs and 1,200 suppliers. It wasn't
until 1995 that the Big Three endorsed TCP/IP as the single protocol.
In September 1996, the AIAG laid out an implementation timetable
calling for selection of the ANX overseer
in the next two months. The overseer would be responsible for
approving the Internet service providers, establishing the central exchange
points and creating basic security measures. At that time, the AIAG was also
hopeful that a pilot would be up and running by second-quarter
1997, with hundreds of companies participating by midyear. Initial
availability for the completed network was slated for September 1997.
As of February 1997, no overseer has been selected. In fact, the AIAG
has now
decided it needs to more carefully spec out the overseer's
job. In January, it contracted with Bellcore to do just that. Bellcore
has 90 days to map out exactly what the overseer should do -- how
certification will be conducted, what metrics will be measured and how
those metrics will be collected and analyzed. "It's very hard to
evaluate bids to be the overseer until you've defined the functions,"
said Robert Moskowitz, a member of the AIAG's Telecommunications
Project Team and information systems technical support specialist at
Chrysler.
The ANX pilot is now scheduled for October, followed by "controlled
availability" to U.S. and Canadian business partners before the end of
the year. Bellcore is slated to support the planned pilot.
Industry officials involved in the project blame these delays on the
Internet's ferment. Choosing standards for firewalls, encryption,
uptime, response time and other technology measures in the flaky and
fluid
Internet environment has led to a lot of internal conflicts
and confusion.
Plus, "realizing we need an overseer designer took a much longer time
than we had anticipated," Moskowitz said.
Forging Ahead
Despite the roadblocks and delays, the AIAG is persistent in its
efforts to build this network. According to industry experts, they have
to be. Fierce competition overseas has raised time-to-market concerns
and spurred an industrywide imperative to continually cut costs.
Plus, information flow, particularly with smaller automotive
suppliers, suffers greatly in the current environment.
The new network is supposed to cut the cost of doing business, but more
importantly, it will speed new automotive designs. Automakers have
struggled with a five-year design cycle, and they want to knock that
down to less than three years.
"What the automotive industry is doing now is critical," said Ted Rybeck,
president of Benchmarking
Partners, a Cambridge, Mass., market analysis and consulting
company that also operates a lab for Internet-based supply-chain best
practices. While the Big Three are cutting edge in their EDI efforts,
EDI is
"a past paradigm. The key is going to be collaborative
decision support between the final automotive dealers, assemblers and
component manufacturers running right back through their suppliers.
As much progress as the current [EDI] systems have made, they're ready
for a
new just-in-time solution," he said.
"With all of the reshuffling that's going on in the supply base and
the increasing globalization of the industry, it's critical to have
as rich an information base as possible in the industry," added David
Cole,
director of the Office for the Study of Automotive
Transportation at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "What the
industry would like to have is a mechanism for facilitating
engineering exchange. Now different suppliers converse in three or
four different languages. That has been an impediment."
Major suppliers such as Johnson Controls,
Inc., Champion and BASF Corp. have
already developed electronic linkages to the Big Three or have them in
development. They are using a combination of the Internet and
VANs as conduits, though many aim to rely on the Internet as their
primary pipeline.
Other suppliers are eagerly awaiting ANX for furthering both their EDI
plans and CAD file transfers, the latter of which can still be
expedited by clumsy manual transfers of magnetic tapes, Kirchoff
noted. At Dofasco, Inc., a Hamilton,
Ontario-based steel manufacturer, a private Internet-based virtual
network called AutoLinx will eventually be connected as a node on the
ANX, extending Dofasco's current EDI and CAD file exchanges with Ford
and other automotive suppliers.
"ANX is the kind of network I think has enormous potential," said Doug
Buchanan, senior specialist of applications development at Dofasco's
IS division. Currently, Dofasco sends its steel parts designs to Ford via
file transfer protocol. Ford does finite element analysis on the
designs before transferring the data back to the steel supplier.
"Right now, it's sort of a static sharing," Buchanan said, adding that
collaborative or interactive CAD is possible with ANX. "My perception
is that most of the technology to collaboratively do CAD/CAM over
networks is there. ANX will help facilitate that."
Waurzyniak is a Detroit-based writer who formerly
worked at Computerworld, InfoWorld and the Dataquest, Inc. market research
firm
as a CAD/CAM analyst.
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