Faurecia, Groupe Renault, Knauf Industries, Simoldes, and Coşkunöz, in association with IBM, have signed a partnership contract for the deployment of XCEED (eXtended Compliance End-to-End Distributed), a blockchain based shared solution to trace the compliance of thousands of parts assembled in a vehicle in almost real time.
Today’s announcement follows the successful testing of the XCEED solution at Renault’s Douai plant, and will be deployed to partners’ plants around Bursa in Turkey, Douai in France, and Palencia in Spain. XCEED is now open to global OEMs and suppliers, no matter the size, throughout the supply chain.
A tool to meet the growing demand for transparency
XCEED improves responsiveness and efficiency at a time of ever-greater regulatory stringency. New market surveillance regulations came into force in September 2020, introducing enhanced regulatory controls for vehicles already on the market. The entire production chain thus must adjust its structure to respond to the regulatory authorities within shorter timeframes.
An inclusive platform for the benefit of the European automotive industry
The ambition with XCEED is to provide a compliance and conformity traceability platform for the entire ecosystem of the European automotive industry, for answering regulation and customer demand, and bolsters European industrial competitivity and technological sovereignty. XCEED is designed to be inclusive for all the automotive industry players worldwide, from multinational companies to SMEs, with access to a powerful, shared digital tool.
XCEED uses the blockchain to create a trusted network for sharing compliance information between parts/systems manufacturers, throughout the supply chain to end vehicle manufacturers. The XCEED platform will help ensure better and more efficient compliance management, while respecting each company’s confidentiality, intellectual property, and data ownership. Having a unique but distributed platform across the automotive ecosystem is a very good way for the industry to answer to the growing requirements of regulation without multiplying complex data reconciliations. It will thereby benefit the European automotive industry by improving information exchange and increasing trust within and outside the ecosystem through automatic sharing, checks and alerts of data in near real time. The solution is the result of the initial action led by its founding partners and based on an open governance approach to welcome new participants. It is also realised in interaction with DG Connect in the European Commission.
Based on “Hyperledger Fabric”, an open-source blockchain protocol, XCEED has been developed in partnership with IBM. It intends to be deployed in a Hybrid Cloud architecture with multiple Cloud providers, among which IBM Cloud, to allow each member to run on the Cloud platform of their own choice.
Launched in 2019, XCEED has been designed and implemented in collaboration with leading automotive industry players – Faurecia, Groupe Renault, Knauf Industries, Simoldes and Coşkunöz – the fruit of collective intelligence and an adaptive agile methodology that marked an unprecedented multi-company approach to data-sharing and project management.
Blockchain proved its value in providing a new way to manage traceability and compliance in the food industry, in supply chain and others. XCEED is our first initiative in the automotive industry that is targeting to tackle component compliance traceability at scale, leveraging the value and benefits of blockchain. At IBM, our goal is to provide this industry with appropriate business solutions, through our experience in building blockchain networks on hybrid multi-cloud solutions, to accelerate this journey and build trust for a global Industry-wide platform.
Dirk Wollschläger, Industry General Manager, IBM
From the very beginning, Faurecia has played a key role within this innovative ecosystem and we are very pleased joining this initiative, a new way of working with our customer Groupe Renault which puts transparency, conformity and traceability at the heart of the supply chain. With this secure, transparent, and automated data sharing system we can trace and resolve issues rapidly, reinforcing compliance, conformity, and competitiveness. We are convinced that this cutting-edge project will change practices in our industry in the years to come.
Eric Jacquot, Group End to End Quality Director, Faurecia
XCEED is a powerful tool for transforming the automotive industry by enabling operational excellence for the whole ecosystem, including smaller players that would not have been able to invest in such technology otherwise.
Odile Panciatici, Coordinator of the XCEED Project, Groupe Renault
As a responsible automotive actor on the market, we decided to join XCEED project to increase our efficiency for ensuring our product traceability and conformity. XCEED is a unique opportunity to assess and adjust our systems and methods to improve our agility in a growing complex environment, and to improve hence our overall performance. XCEED is also fully aligned with Knauf Group’s digital strategy and Corporate Social Responsibility policy. With XCEED, we have a consistent approach between our shared expertise during a program concept phase until the end of vehicle’s life. We are glad to belong to an automotive community that will create value and contribute to increase transparency on the market.
Sylvie Janod, Automotive Market Director, Knauf Industries
When we understood the XCEED blockchain project would contribute to Operational Excellence by bringing simplicity, speed, transparency and compliance, involving all participants in the business supply chain we immediately decided to be part of this project as it fits with Simoldes vision “juntos fazemos melhor” and our path to Industry 4.0.
Jaime Sá, Board member, Simoldes
We are excited to be part of this pioneering digitalization movement in the automotive sector, as an initial partner company of the XCEED Project. With this global project, we believe that Coşkunöz will achieve a crucial step forward on its digitalization vision journey.
Barış Karaadak, General Manager, Coşkunöz
SOURCE: Renault
