Volkswagen is striving to achieve considerable economies of scale with its standardized software platform. The vehicle fleet is expected to comprise of more than 10 million fully networked new vehicles per year, significantly reducing the cost of software integration in each individual vehicle. At the same time, digital ecosystems are becoming more and more attractive for new partners and new customers with an increasing number of connected vehicles.
As of January 1, 2020, the Car.Software organization will operate as an independent business unit within the Group. By 2025, the new organization intends to invest more than seven billion euros in its tasks and projects. Volkswagen will introduce flexible working models, the latest collaborative technologies and agile forms of cooperation.
Industrial Cloud networks production
In addition to the Automotive Cloud, which Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess presented together with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in February, Volkswagen is driving forward a second major cloud project, the Industrial Cloud. This cloud will be jointly set up with Amazon Web Services and is intended to network the Group’s global production network with 122 production facilities in the future.
“We will continue to strengthen production as a competitive element for Volkswagen Group. Our strategic cooperation with Amazon Web Services creates key conditions for this,” says Oliver Blume, Chairman of the Board of Management of Porsche and responsible for Production on the Board of Management of Volkswagen AG. “The Volkswagen Group with its global expertise in automotive manufacturing and Amazon Web Services with its technological know-how complement each other perfectly. With our global industry platform, we want to create a growing industrial ecosystem whose transparency and efficiency benefit all parties involved.”
In the cloud, the data of all machines, facilities and systems from all plants will be combined. This will enable Volkswagen to better analyze the processes – and lead to its acceleration. In the future, the global supply chain with more than 30,000 locations and 1,500 partner companies will also be integrated into the cloud.
Martin Hofmann, head of IT at the Volkswagen Group, also underlines the importance of this networking: “Today we still have the situation that IT within the production level at the plants differs to some extent – because most locations are very different. That doesn’t make it easy to standardize data and combine it across the board. With the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud, we are able to do this: we consolidate the data from all locations. In the future, we will be able to evaluate and control all key figures from production and logistics globally, regardless of their format. We’re going live with Industry 4.0.”