Ford

The process of vehicle manufacture is a complex one with matters made worse by the fact the long assembly lines are rarely in a position to produce the same vehicle twice.

The manufacturing plants now build cars to order, the user has selected engine capacity, colour, trim, wheels, ABS - a whole selection of options. Different countries also impose their own restrictions or even fuel types meaning the manufacturing plants really have to be highly versatile.

At the heart of this versatility is of course the VAX, running an application that tracks each vehicle as it progresses down the assembly line. The VAX application makes sure the correct components are delivered to the assembly line just as the chassis arrives at that fitting post. It controls everything from body shell and colour to engine type and windscreen shade.

What you cannot afford to happen in this case is to have a VAX fail, yet at 20 years old that was happening more and more and so it was identified as an unacceptable business risk.

The problem was this was a complex application tweaked and improved over many years into what many regarded as the best production application available. The cost to replace it was estimated at £10 million with the initial study to specify the replacement expected to take a year to complete at least.

Migration proved to be an outstanding success and within three years the migrated systems had replaced all the plants' VAX systems at a tiny fraction of the alternative cost. These emulated VAX systems will be kept on the hardware of the day for at least 15 years to come.

To discuss this case study, or for more information about how Swiftbase can help your company or organisation, please get in touch.