Volkswagen has inked a multi-year global agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud, a cloud-based digital production platform that aims to “transform the company’s manufacturing and logistics processes.”
Pulling together real-time data from Volkswagen’s 122 manufacturing plants, the German automotive firm will use AWS IoT services to collect, organise and analyse data from the plant floor. In doing so, the firm desires to get in-depth insights into its manufacturing operations that will drive production efficiency. “We will keep to strengthen production as a key competitive factor for the Volkswagen Group. Our strategic collaboration with AWS will lay the foundation,” says 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 AWS, with its technological know-how, complement each other very well. “With our global industry platform, we want to build a growing industrial ecosystem with transparency and efficiency bringing benefits to all concerned.”
Volkswagen has also developed a data lake in partnership with AWS, that will help it “ pinpoint operational trends, improve forecasting, and streamline operations by identifying gaps in production and waste.” Additionlly, the German carmaker plans to use Amazon SageMaker, a service that helps developers and data scientists build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly.“Volkswagen’s industrial cloud, which will reinvent its manufacturing and logistics processes, is yet another example of how Volkswagen continues to innovate and lead,” added Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS.
“Volkswagen's and AWS's collaboration will have a powerful affect on efficiency and quality in production throughout Volkswagen’s global supply chain, as Volkswagen increases 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.”