Ford Motor Company nominate MacDonald Humfrey (Automation) Ltd for the prestigious ' IT Project of the Year’.

MacDonald Humfrey (Automation) Ltd worked closely with the Ford engineers at the Castle Bromwich plant to develop, design and implement a complete hardware and software replacement system for the existing twenty year old computer scheduling system which controlled the live scheduling of cars from the BIW and Colour Body Store in the plant.

The system replacement known as the ‘Integrated Body Stores Control System' (IBSC) was an extremely tough challenge and involved migrating the new system across with no disruption to production facilities.  To achieve this, a large amount of factory acceptance testing and out of hours working was required, with windows of opportunity to implement very limited.

The final result was a significant step forward for the plant allowing the existing BSC technology to be retired and migration onto the Edison compliant infrastructure, offering the plant an up to date, robust and supportable common Ford platform.

Apart from the elimination of business risk, another highlight of the project was the business cost savings related to old legacy system support going forward.