Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, and the Volkswagen Group have announced a multi-year, global agreement to build the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud, a cloud-based Industrial digital production platform that will transform the automotive company’s manufacturing and logistics processes. Volkswagen will rely upon the breadth and depth of AWS’s portfolio of services, including IoT, machine learning, analytics and compute services to increase plant efficiency and uptime, improve production flexibility and increase vehicle quality.
The Volkswagen Industrial Cloud will bring together real-time data from all of the Volkswagen Group’s 122 manufacturing plants to manage the overall effectiveness of assembly equipment, as well as track parts and vehicles. Volkswagen will use the suite of AWS Internet of Things (IoT) services, including AWS IoT Greengrass, AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Analytics and AWS IoT SiteWise, to detect, collect, organize and run sophisticated analytics on data from the plant floor.
AWS’s IoT services will deliver new insights into manufacturing operations across facilities that will optimize production and improve process efficiencies, according to Amazon. With a company-wide Data Lake built on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to analyze the data, Volkswagen will be able to glean insights that will pinpoint operational trends, improve forecasting and streamline operations by identifying gaps in production and waste. Volkswagen will use Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service that provides developers and data scientists with the ability to build, train and deploy machine learning models quickly, to optimize the operation of machinery and equipment in all of its plants.
In addition, Volkswagen plans to use AWS Outposts, which bring native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models on-premises, providing seamless functionality between the factory floor and the cloud for latency sensitive applications, offering a consistent hybrid experience.
“We will continue to strengthen production as a key competitive factor for the Volkswagen Group. Our strategic collaboration with AWS 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 AWS, 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.”
