How Cloud Solutions Help Transform Manufacturing Operations: Executive Series with Porsche AG’s Albrecht Reimold

This article originally appeared on LinkedIn and has been translated to English.

The Volkswagen Group Digital Production Platform (DPP), is making a significant contribution to Porsche’s digital transformation within production and logistics. The cloud not only brings new, innovative technologies, but also changes the way we think about IT systems holistically. The collaboration of Volkswagen with Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers new opportunities to increase the speed of future IT developments, especially for shared back-end services.

Success Factors of the Future: Innovation and Work Culture

“Volkswagen has deep and established technological knowledge with a focus on automotive processes. What we can learn, above all, is speed. A platform like the Digital Production Platform is a great opportunity for this,” said my colleague Mattias Ulbrich (CIO Porsche AG) recently in a joint live talk at the Porsche Museum.

Together with Ralf Kleber (Vice President, Amazon Germany) and Frank Göller (Head of Digital Production, Volkswagen AG), we discussed the benefits of platforms, Industry 4.0, the factory of the future, as well as the culture of innovation and working methods from the point of view of different brands in the first DPP Fireside Chat.

In addition to innovation and work culture, the focus on customer needs is one of the success factors of the future. I think we have to be curious and stay curious, while listening to customers, but also to employees. This will enable us to leverage new technologies to innovate for our customers.

Ralf also confirmed that customer focus is essential to successfully transform a business. As part of our talk, he emphasized: “At Amazon, we always work backwards from the customer. What is the customer’s problem that we want to solve?”

What is important to me is, that, as part of the strategic collaboration, both companies learn from and inspire each other. As Ralf highlighted: “We have to learn from Porsche how to survive 100 years. And we must maintain our willingness to learn and be curious, as Porsche and Volkswagen are doing at the moment.”

Volkswagen DPP Fireside Chat Video

Intelligent Quality Control

The first successes of the collaboration between AWS and Porsche can already be seen in production. To give just one example: Porsche developed a camera-based application for “intelligent sign inspection” (iSi) on the Digital Production Platform,. This enables automatic documentation and quality control of registration and type approval relevant signs and labels during the production process.

Why is this needed? In order to ensure compliance with quality standards in production, various manual inspections are mandatory. At the assembly line, these quality controls are particularly time-consuming. For example, employees need to check labels for damage and completeness. In addition, some labels contain country-specific information in the customer’s language (which can be English or Chinese) and must display the correct licensing information — making a manual verification time-consuming. The camera based application reliably improves this quality assurance process by matching the applied label with the correct one and alerting the employee if the wrong label has been applied.

Going forward, we will continue to implement further digitized processes in production.

More about the Industrial Cloud can be found here.