Car manufacturer Honda Motor Co is using NTT Communications’ Enterprise Cloud service to strengthen its global supplier network and cut costs.
NTT Com, has been providing the automaker with its Enterprise Cloud service from delivery centers in Japan and Singapore since 2013. To date, Honda has increased its file-sharing speed by a factor of 14, while reducing operating costs by 30% on an annual basis. Honda is currently planning to expand its use of Enterprise Cloud infrastructure in other key areas of its global business.
NTT Com’s Enterprise Cloud, the first private cloud to deploy SDN, is built on global cloud infrastructure provided from 11 delivery centers in 9 countries.
Honda’s global network encompasses more than 10,000 suppliers and 54 countries. In 2011, it began reorganizing its internal system for development, procurement and production in specific markets, aiming to strengthen cross-group collaboration to quickly launch price-competitive products that meet local demands. Such collaboration requires the sharing of CAD and other huge data files with suppliers globally, but Honda experienced difficulties with differing systems and security levels among its many markets, resulting in slow data transfers along with added time and cost to introduce new systems.
NTT Com’s solution was to use Enterprise Cloud to standardize existing systems and reduce the time and cost of deploying new systems with a virtualized environment. As a result, Honda has vastly increased its large data transfer speeds and broadly standardized its supplier network, thereby supporting faster and more cost-efficient development, procurement and production operations.