Mar 27, 2019   SOURCE: BusinessWire

Volkswagen and AWS Join Forces to Transform Automotive Manufacturing

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), and the Volkswagen Group 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 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. With a company-wide Data Lake built on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to analyze 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 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. Additionally, 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,” 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 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.”

About Amazon Web Services

For 13 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 165 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 61 Availability Zones (AZs) within 20 geographic regions, spanning the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Sweden, and the UK. Millions of customers including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

About Volkswagen

The Volkswagen Group, with its headquarters in Wolfsburg, is one of the world’s leading automobile manufacturers and the largest carmaker in Europe. The Group comprises twelve brands from seven European countries. In addition, the Volkswagen Group offers a wide range of financial services, including dealer and customer financing, leasing, banking and insurance activities, and fleet management. The Group operates 122 production plants in 20 European countries and a further 11 countries in the Americas, Asia and Africa. 664,496 employees worldwide produce vehicles, and work in vehicle-related services or other fields of business. The Volkswagen Group sells its vehicles in 153 countries.