The Volkswagen Group is forging ahead with the integration of its plants into the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud. The aim is to further improve the efficiency of the plants and reduce production costs. The first three plants were already linked up in 2019. “In 2020, we intend to bring 15 further plants into the Cloud,” says Gerd Walker, Head of Production of the Volkswagen Group. Work on the project also continued consistently while production was suspended during the coronavirus crisis. “We are making good progress and significantly forcing the pace,” says Roy Sauer, Head of Enterprise & Platform Architecture of the Volkswagen Group. From 2016 to 2025, Volkswagen intends to boost the productivity of its plants by 30 percent and “our Industrial Cloud will be a key lever for achieving this objective,” says Walker. All in all, the Group expects cost savings totaling several billion euros when the data of all 124 plants can be evaluated in a standardized way. The Industrial Cloud is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Siemens is the integration partner.
In 2019, the Volkswagen Group initially started with the Volkswagen Passenger Cars brand’s Chemnitz, Wolfsburg and Polkowice (Poland) plants, in line with its plans. “We are now forcing the pace and taking the Industrial Cloud to a large number of plants,” says Walker. This year, up to 15 further plants from the Audi, Seat, Skoda, Volkswagen Passenger Cars, Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Porsche and Components brands are to be connected. These include the plants at Brunswick, Emden, Hanover, Ingolstadt, Kassel, Leipzig, Neckarsulm, Salzgitter, Zuffenhausen and Zwickau (all in Germany), Martorell (Spain), Palmela (Portugal), Györ (Hungary), and Mladá Boleslav and Vrchlabi (Czech Republic).
“We’re delighted to see the rapid pace of development and expansion of the Industrial Cloud across more Volkswagen production facilities this year,” says Dirk Didascalou, VP of AWS IoT, Amazon Web Services (AWS). “The functionality we are jointly developing on top of AWS is providing a cost-effective and standardized way to collect and organize plant data into the Industrial Cloud and accelerate the delivery of use cases that further improve the efficiency of Volkswagen’s manufacturing and logistics processes.”
Cost savings through standardization
In the first step, the Group defined 15 different applications which are now being made available as standardized apps for all plants. The main focuses include the predictive maintenance of machines and the reduction of reworking on vehicles through artificial intelligence (AI). The implementation of the first 15 applications alone is already expected to bring cost savings of about €200 million up to the end of 2025.
Please click here to view the full press release.
SOURCE: Volkswagen
