March 1, 2005

By Jason Deign, News@Cisco

Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries Co., Ltd (IHI), a Japanese firm with a 150-year history, is coming right up to date with an Internet Protocol (IP) Communications system from Cisco Systems®.

The company plans to install approximately 3,000 IP phones in plants in Kure and Mizuho by February 2005. One third of these will be Cisco 7920 wireless IP phones.

IHI will also introduce Cisco IP Communication systems in almost all plants, branches and offices ahead of the opening of a new head office in Toyosu, scheduled for 2006. The company aims to lower costs, improve productivity and promote progressive reforms in its corporate culture.

Manufacturing was the driving force supporting the rapid economic growth of Japan and companies such as IHI still play an important role as the source of Japan's competitiveness.

However, the rise of China and other Asian countries has resulted in increased international competition, making it less easy for Japan to maintain its competitive advantage in the manufacturing industry.

Japanese manufacturers are forced to reduce delivery times and avoid the loss of opportunities by strengthening communication between design and manufacturing workers, while further improving efficiency in factories.

In order to address this issue, IHI formulated a five-year IP plan in 2001 and the same year updated campus LANs in plants at Tanashi and Yokohama from an ATM-based core to a gigabit network running with Cisco switches.

Following this, the company's data WAN, made up of leased lines, was changed to a wide-area Ethernet service with Cisco routers. IHI is continuing with network updates such as the implementation of a gigabit network in its Yokohama Engineering Center.

Meanwhile the company has embarked on a project to update its voice network.

The three plants in the Kure region and one in Mizuho used private branch exchange (PBX)-based telephone systems and IHI first connected these PBXs to IP gateways to integrate voice lines with data lines in June 2004.

IHI estimates communication expenses can be reduced by approximately 20 percent, while saving on maintenance expenses and the 10 to 20 million yen required for changing PBX settings during personnel transfers.

Furthermore, as only LAN cables are required when laying cable, a reduction in construction costs when opening new offices or changing the layout of existing offices is anticipated.

And until now only five percent of IHI employees had been given mobile phones or handhelds because of the call charges that had to be paid to telecommunication carriers.

However, Cisco 7920 wireless IP phones do not incur carrier charges, making it possible to equip around 30 percent of plant workers with handsets.

This is a major productivity improvement, allowing employees on the move, for example, to get hold of computer-aided design diagrams and information required for production technology, over the gigabit network.

"As goods move within a plant, people also move, but the unnecessary movement of personnel is eliminated if communication can be conducted in detail," says Shinichi Muroi, IHI Information Systems Department planning group manager.

He adds that the company would like to improve the management of goods using integrated circuit tags in the future.

Cisco IP communications technology is also helping create virtual teams.

Takeshi Mazuka, planning group assistant manager in IHI's Information Systems Department, says: "At IHI, designers, production engineers and sales personnel participating in any given project are working in different locations in an overwhelming proportion of cases."

Virtual team-working is expected to help IHI adopt a "front loading" approach to work, which involves performing many tasks in the initial stages of a project to reduce the work required in later processes.

IHI is using Cisco AVVID (Architecture for Voice, Video and Integrated Data) as the basis for its IP Communications platform, with Cisco IP Phone 7912G units developed for the Japanese market and Cisco IP Phone 7920 wireless handsets.

In addition, the company has installed six Cisco CallManager call processing servers at its Tokyo Engineering Center in Toyosu.

These are connected to Cisco Catalyst® switches to provide dialing and calling services to plants that have IP phones, using routers and wide-area Ethernet services.

The switch in the Tokyo Engineering Center is connected to a voice-over-IP gateway which connects calls with the existing PBX-based telephone system.

In plants where IP telephones are installed, the company uses the Catalyst 6500 Series for backbone switches, the Catalyst 3550 for division switches, the Catalyst 2950 Series for terminal switches and the Cisco Aironet 1200 Series for wireless LAN access points.

In addition to this network equipment, the company also plans implementation of a CiscoWorks Wireless LAN Solution Engine system, a Cisco Secure Access Control Server and a CiscoWorks LAN Management Solution.

"We have been focusing on IP telephony for four or five years and we feel it has recently become a sufficiently mature technology," says Muroi.

"In the new head office, we will further accelerate work-style innovation and business process reforms based on a paperless environment, authorization infrastructure and workflow."

Jason Deign is a freelance journalist located in Barcelona, Spain.