VW and Amazon join forces to network plants in cloud

BERLIN, March 27 (Xinhua) -- Volkswagen is planning to jointly develop an Industrial Cloud production platform with online retail giant Amazon in order to increase the efficiency of the German carmaker's production plants, the two companies announced on Wednesday.

"We will continue to strengthen production as a key competitive factor for the Volkswagen Group," said Oliver Blume, Volkswagen Management Board member responsible for production, adding that "our strategic collaboration with Amazon Web Services will lay the foundation."

According to the two companies, the jointly developed Industrial Cloud will combine real-time data of all machines, plants and systems from all of the Volkswagen Group's 122 plants worldwide.

Around 220 IT specialists will be working on the development of the Industrial Cloud. According to Volkswagen, the entire global supply chain with over 30,000 locations and more than 1,500 suppliers and partner companies could eventually be integrated into the new Volkswagen cloud.

This would create "new prospects for the optimization of processes in production and allow considerable productivity improvements at the plants," Germany's largest carmaker announced. "It is also conceivable that the cloud platform will generally be accessible to other car manufacturers."

"The aim is to bundle data streams in order to obtain an accurate picture of the situation at our plants," a press spokesman of Volkswagen told Xinhua. "We want to know exactly what is happening where at all times."

In the past, it was "very difficult" to obtain a centralized view because many Volkswagen plants worked with different production and logistics systems, the Volkswagen spokesperson explained.

By developing the Industrial Cloud platform in cooperation with Amazon, Volkswagen is seeking to create "essential technological prerequisites" for meeting its production efficiency targets.

In 2018, Volkswagen's Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Herbert Diess said that "we intend to work with (all of Volkswagen's 12 brands) and boost efficiency by around 30 percent by 2025."