Candle Power Drives Rover - or "How BMW intend Rover Group to be profitable"
Ag@whd
of
advantage to be won from business integration. For example, adding
Rover's purchasing power to BMW's could save GBP 3m per annum. In the
resulting systems integration project, Candle's IBM MQSeries expertise
was a vital component.
The Rover Group is Britain's largest motor manufacturer. Internationally
known for the Land Rover and Range Rover, MG and Mini, it produces over
half-a-million vehicles a year. The company has 39,000 employees and
annual sales of GBP 6,577 million. Earning over GBP 3,174 million
overseas revenue each year makes Rover Group the UK's third largest
exporter.
In 1994, BMW acquired the Rover Group. One of the many benefits sought
from this purchase was economies of scale in manufacturing through
integrating business operations. Combined, the two companies would have
greater purchasing power, cutting the manufacturing cost of each Rover
(and BMW).
BMW runs a global purchasing system (GPS) which it uses to manage and
administer its worldwide procurement of goods and services. The system
is able to identify the value of purchases made with any supplier, so
that BMW companies may take advantage of suppliers' volume related
discounts based on the entire group's spend.
In order for Rover to take advantage of the global purchasing power of
BMW (as well as add to it), Rover needed to adopt the GPS system.
Integrating Rover's existing purchasing system with GPS was considered,
but this was dismissed as impractical and expensive.
"The route ahead was clearly to extend the GPS application to the Rover
Group," said Stuart Cox, the Rover Group IT project manager responsible
for implementing GPS across the company. 'A complex project, GPS
interfaces would need to extend into many business applications in
Rover, such as financial, design, parts and stores, scheduling,
assembly, and logistics systems. However, we calculated that if we took
advantage of BMW's purchasing power, then once GPS was fully operational
at Rover, we could save GBP 3m per year by purchasing more effectively"
Candle Corporation is an IBM Value Added Reseller (W) for IBM's MQ
Series middleware and is able to implement the product and provide
additional products and services related to MQSeries such as
availability management. To bring the Rover Group onto GPS, a middleware
solution was required to interface the many business applications that
were running on heterogeneous platforms. IBM's MQSeries was chosen as it
was already proven across BMW
The go-ahead for Rover to implement GPS was given and Candle was
selected to supply MQSeries, install it, and configure it to deliver
maximum performance and availability. Implementation of GPS and of
MQSeries commenced in March, with GPS going into limited production in
August.
"Candle worked with MQSeries to ensure that it would manipulate data
from our many business applications into an acceptable format for GPS,"
said Cox. Working with Candle, Rover estimates that improved purchasing
economies will recover the entire GPS project costs within 18 months to
two years. But it is indeed a complex project. At BMW in Germany, GPS
runs on an Amdahl mainframe and it exchanges data with the UK GPS
application running on NT/Server. In the UK, the many business
applications, which communicate via MQSeries with GPS, run on a wide
variety of platforms. Candle is ensuring that MQSeries, the vital link
between these applications, stays up and performs optimally in its
support of GPS.
IBM ships MQSeries with Candle Command Centre Admin Pac (to get
companies started with administering MQSeries). To take companies
further, Candle also offers an upgrade to its Candle Command Centre
Management Pac which is a more extensive set of tools. Cox explained:
"Unless you have considerable IT skills in MQSeries, Candle's Admin Pac:
and Management Pac are essential tools for monitoring and manipulating
the flow of data between applications and MQSeries." He continued:
"Candle's products give us a user-friendly front end to observing and
managing data flow and events within the systems."
In the event of problems between the interfaces linked through MQSeries,
it is vital that they are resolved urgently. Cox expanded: "Many
components in vehicle manufacturing are scheduled and delivered on a
just-in-time basis and GPS has to support that need 24 hours a day for
365 days a year. If GPS went down for just an hour, it could compromise
component deliveries to the assembly line, affecting production."
Adrian
WWW WWW Adrian Gothard
WWW ww WWW White Horse Design
WWWWWWWWWW
WWWW WWWW w...@zetnet.co.uk, http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/whd
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Designers of video capture/filter/processing systems for aircraft