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"We saw these projects coming, so we had to move and get a network in place that could support them," says Mark Ruhenkamp, network administrator for the company, which is the world's leading maker of medical and dental capital equipment, including examination tables and lighting.

"JIT provides a better way of meeting our customers' ever-increasing needs, while controlling our manufacturing operations and decreasing overall cost," says Karl Weidner, Midmark's vice president of manufacturing.

Midmark's JIT cutover is under way. JIT is more of a "flow-and-pull" operation, where examination tables, for instance, aren't made until an order is placed so inventory doesn't get backlogged. Unlike the older "push" method of manufacturing, JIT also frees Midmark from clustering its manufacturing and engineering users with specific equipment and systems. The company instead is grouping engineering, purchasing and manufacturing scheduling by product family, Weidner says.

"Specific users will be more spread out--all engineers won't be located in the same area. So we need bandwidth everywhere, not just in one location," Ruhenkamp says.

The gigabit backbone replaced Midmark's old FDDI network of shared 10BASE-T Ethernet connections. But like most companies, Midmark so far is using only about 2 percent of the fat gigabit pipe. Still, the switched network makes it easier to make the moves and changes in Midmark's more fluid JIT environment. Engineers that design examination tables, for instance, now have switched 10/100-Mbps Ethernet to the desktop and don't have to be isolated to a single floor in their former small, locally shared 10-Mbps LANs. "We can install a new 3Com stackable switch when there are several people moving at once," Ruhenkamp says.

Thin clients may also be on the horizon for Midmark. These stripped-down PCs, which are becoming increasingly popular for the shop floor, could be installed on the new IP-based gigabit network sometime next year. Midmark also may use these client boxes with its new ERP system. "We can put a thin client on the floor and leave all of the processing on the back end," Ruhenkamp says.

Midmark is still evaluating the top ERP packages to replace its legacy business applications running on Hewlett-Packard Co.'s HP MPE/iX. ERP applications are infamous for being graphics- heavy, and typically require fat pipes or QoS (Quality of Service) mechanisms to ensure that they get priority on the network. Ruhenkamp says Midmark won't need to deploy QoS right away, however.

Meanwhile, Ruhenkamp says managing the switched network is simpler than managing the old fixed network, but there is a small trade-off. "In a shared-hub environment, monitoring traffic was easier because traffic was broadcast to each port. But Layer 3 switching directs it to each particular port," which requires setting up analyzer ports to monitor or mirror traffic, Ruhenkamp says.