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 hopes to transform the automotive company’s manufacturing and logistics processes.
Volkswagen says they 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 promises to 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 IoT services, including AWS IoT Greengrass, AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Analytics, and AWS IoT SiteWise, to detect, collect, organise, and run sophisticated analytics on data from the plant floor.
AWS says its IoT services will deliver new insights into manufacturing operations across facilities that will optimise production and improve process efficiencies. With a company-wide Data Lake built on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to analyse the data, Volkswagen will glean insights that will pinpoint operational trends, improve forecasting, and streamline operations by identifying gaps in production and waste.
Volkswagen will also utilise 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 optimise the operation of machinery and equipment in all of its plants.
“We will continue 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 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,” adds Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS.
