The benefit of collaboration ready networks

Glenn Moore

The automotive industry, for all its knocks over the past few years, remains one of the most collaborative industries in the world.  Suppliers and manufacturers understand that teams that work collaboratively obtain greater resources, recognition and reward when facing competition for finite resources. 

 

Those who closely follow developments in manufacturing collaboration had something to cheer about last week.  ANX announced that it had interconnected the ANX Network with the European Exchange Network (ENX).  This allows all ANX suppliers and OEMs in North America to connect to ENX suppliers and OEMs in Europe on a secure, private network.  ANX and ENX are allowing their user communities to connect to each other at no additional cost.

 

So why is this important?

 

Simple.  It allows members of these separate networks to be “collaboration ready” with each other.   

 

They can form new supply chain partnerships with less concern over how to connect and exchange critical information like CAD drawings.  Anyone that’s established business-to-business VPN tunnels knows how time consuming this task can become.  When lucrative new sourcing projects emerge, time is of the essence.  Partners need to get connected and electronically bonded very quickly.  The ANX-ENX integration supports partnership growth with the least amount of IT effort.

 

The ANX-ENX partnership addresses another key requirement for collaboration readiness – security.  Companies that don’t use ANX-ENX typically share critical intellectual property over the public Internet.  Who’s accountable for protecting data in motion across the public Internet (rhetorical question)?  Security experts warn that the quantity and sophistication of attacks against information sent over the public Internet will continue to grow at an astonishing rate.  Also, solutions that use the public Internet can only make optimistic promises of end-to-end performance.   Members of the ANX and ENX network don’t have to worry about security, availability and performance.  These high performance networks are private and are supported end-to-end by the ANX and ENX.

 

I’m interested in learning about other benefits of “collaboration readiness” and invite comments on the topic.

 

Links:

ENX
ANX-ENX Announcment