Case Study - Ford Rollout

Ford and Data Interchange recently worked in partnership to migrate 600 Ford suppliers to a new EDI platform. This was achieved ahead of the project timescales and with the minimum of disruption to the supply chain.

The project was initiated because the FordNet software, which had handled the bulk of Ford EDI traffic since 1985, had reached the end of its licence period. This provided Ford with the opportunity to eliminate this legacy system and replace it with a solution built upon the ODETTE File Transfer Protocol (OFTP), which is the dominant protocol within the Automotive industry, over a TCP/IP based network.

DARWIN met all of Ford’s EDI requirements and was already in use with a number of European suppliers.

Although the suppliers were free to use any OFTP solution, DARWIN was chosen by over 85% of the European suppliers to replace the legacy Ford Net system.