Volkswagen chooses Siemens for its industrial cloud

Siemens technology group is to be the integration partner for the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud.

Siemens will play a key role in ensuring that machinery and equipment of different manufacturers at the 122 Volkswagen plants are networked efficiently in the cloud.

The resulting data transparency and analysis will lay the technological foundations for productivity improvements at Volkswagen plants.

In addition, Siemens and machinery and equipment suppliers will make applications and apps from the MindSphere Internet of Things system available in the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud.

Volkswagen and Siemens intend to develop new functions and services for the Industrial Cloud together with machinery and equipment suppliers; these will then be available to all future partners.

Siemens is contributing its expertise in automation, the networking of machinery and plant and the world of industrial IoT to cooperation with Volkswagen.

Production data will be processed directly by equipment and machinery or in the production process before they are transmitted to the Industrial Cloud. This will allow optimisation of complex production processes and also improve the data quality of the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud.

For example, Siemens and MindSphere partners also offer applications for the predictive maintenance of machines with optimised maintenance cycles calculated in advance.

Via the cloud, these can then be rolled out to all the Volkswagen plants. It will be possible to control Volkswagen’s production environment and supply chain  more efficiently because the connected suppliers and machinery producers will also benefit from the knowledge gained from data analysis.

With the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud, which is being developed jointly with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Volkswagen Group is laying the foundation for the seamless digitalisation of its production and logistics.

In the long term, this will also include the integration of Volkswagen’s global supply chain with more than 30,000 locations of over 1,500 suppliers and partner companies. In future, the Industrial Cloud will also be available as a platform for other partners.