Volkswagen Industrial Cloud to house data of 122 Group facilities

Volkswagen and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are to develop the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud together. Both companies have 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 optimisation of processes in production and allows considerable productivity improvements at the plants. In the long term, the VW Group’s global supply chain 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.”

Targeting seamless digitalisation
With the Industrial Cloud, Volkswagen says it is laying the foundation for the seamless digitalisation of its production and logistics. IT at the production level of machinery, equipment and systems. For example, production planning and inventory management is to be standardised and networked across all 122 production plants of the Volkswagen Group. To date, there have been differences between the individual plants.

Volkswagen, which is creating the Industrial Cloud as an open platform, aims to integrate companies from the entire value stream and build up a network of industrial partners with a database and information that will bring benefits to all concerned. 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. It is also conceivable that the cloud platform will generally be accessible to other car manufacturers. This will create a steadily growing global industrial ecosystem.

Specific negotiations with major industrial companies interested in migrating to the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud are already in progress.

Expert teams from Volkswagen and Amazon Web Services are already ahead with the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud together. In the medium term, about 220 specialists are to work on the project. They are based at several Volkswagen IT competence centres, as well as a projected joint Industrial Cloud Innovation Center in Berlin. Experts in Dresden, Munich and Wolfsburg are to support further. Work is to begin immediately. The teams have already set 140 projects for integration. For example, these include a system for tracing the transfer of goods in- and outside the factory, e.g. by trucks (vehicle locating service) and services for the cross-plant analysis of system efficiency (overall equipment effectiveness, OEE). The goal is to put the Industrial Cloud and the first concrete services and functions into operation by the end of 2019.