You can’t accuse Volkswagen’s Dirk Voigt of having his head in the clouds—he’ll take it as a compliment. The head of digital production at VW, Voigt and a team of manufacturing and IT pros are developing an industrial cloud computing system to amalgamate production data from more than 120 factories. The objective: greater efficiency and lower costs.
The project was launched in 2019, when VW assembly plants in Chemnitz, Germany, Wolfsburg, Germany, and Polkowice, Poland, because the first to transmit production data to the cloud. One year later, 15 additional European factories joined the cloud, including the VW assembly plant in Palmela, Portugal, the Škoda plant in Mlada Boleslav, Czech Republic, and the VW assembly plant in Chattanooga, TN. In 2021, another 24 sites were added to the platform, including VW facilities in South America. Now, all of VW’s major car and component plants are connected.