The objective of the Industrial Cloud is to optimize production and boost productivity in Volkswagen’s 122 factories. The long-term objective is to also integrate the Volkswagen Group’s global supply chain, boasting some 30,000 facilities and over 1,500 suppliers and partner companies. The backbone of the system is the carmaker’s new Digital Production Platform (DPP): All the Group’s facilities and companies outside the Group will dock their system architectures onto this platform, to standardize data exchange between systems and plants. The cloud is also intended to be an open industrial ecosystem, which will subsequently be accessible to other partners and car manufacturers. Negotiations with major industrial companies interested in migrating to the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud are reputedly already in progress. The goal is to put the Industrial Cloud into operation by the end of 2019.

As the integration partner , Siemens will play a key role in ensuring the factories are networked efficiently in the cloud. The technology group will leverage its IoT platform MindSphere and MindSphere’s applications and apps to analyze the machine data. Edge computing solutions will also be installed, to process and analyze current production data directly on-site before it is transmitted to the Industrial Cloud.