Volkswagen and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are to develop the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud together. Both companies Services announced a multi-year, global agreement to jointly develop this project. In future, the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud will combine the data of all machines, plants and systems from all 122 facilities of the Volkswagen Group. This will create new prospects for the optimization of processes in production and allows considerable productivity improvements at the plants. The Volkswagen Industrial Cloud thus creates the essential prerequisites for achieving the productivity goals in production. In the long term, the global supply chain of the Volkswagen Group with more than 30,000 locations of over 1,500 suppliers and partner companies could also be integrated. By leveraging Amazon Web Services technology and services, Volkswagen is creating its Industrial Cloud as an open industry platform which other partners from industry, logistics and sales may use in the future.
“We will continue to strengthen production as a key competitive factor for the Volkswagen Group. Our strategic collaboration with Amazon Web Services will lay the foundation,” said Oliver Blume, Chairman of the Executive Board of Porsche AG and Member of the Board of Management of Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft responsible for ‘Production’. “The Volkswagen Group, with its global expertise in automobile production, and Amazon Web Services, with its technological know-how, complement each other extraordinarily well. With our global industry platform we want to create a growing industrial ecosystem with transparency and efficiency bringing benefits to all concerned.”
“Volkswagen’s industrial cloud, which will reinvent its manufacturing and logistics processes, is yet another example of how Volkswagen continues to innovate and lead,” said Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS. “Volkswagen’s and AWS’s collaboration will have a profound impact on efficiency and quality in production throughout Volkswagen’s global supply chain, as Volkswagen gains access to the broadest and deepest cloud with the most functionality, the most innovation, the highest performance and security, and the largest community of partners and customers of any other infrastructure provider. We are tightly aligned across Volkswagen’s businesses to help them reimagine the future of automobile manufacturing by taking advantage of all the benefits the cloud can deliver.”
IT in production to be standardized and networked within cloud
Through the development of the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud, the Volkswagen is laying the foundation for the seamless digitalization of its production and logistics. IT at the production level of machinery, equipment and systems – for example for production planning and inventory management – is to be standardized and networked across all 122 production plants of the Volkswagen Group. To date, there have been differences between the individual plants.
Volkswagen has chosen the AWS portfolio of services including Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning analytics and compute services, which were developed especially for production environment and will be extended to the requirements of the automotive industry. The architecture will be the new Digital Production Platform (DPP) from Volkswagen in future. All the Group’s plants and companies outside the Group will dock their system architectures onto this platform. This platform will standardize and simplify data exchange between systems and plants.
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SOURCE: Volkswagen
