The Volkswagen Group will be a founding member of the Catena-X Automotive Network, the German car giant has announced. The union, which currently consists of 25 partners from the fields of business and science, is pursuing the goal of creating uniform standards for the flow of data and information in the automotive value chain. This should serve as the basis for a digital ecosystem in which automobile manufacturers and suppliers, dealer associations as well as technology suppliers can take part. Volkswagen expects the cross-company, secure and antitrust law compliant data exchange to result in new opportunities for increased efficiency and transparency for production and supply chains.
“Digitalisation and networking play a key role for the production and supply chains of the future,” added Murat Aksel, member of the Board of Management of Volkswagen AG with responsibility for Purchasing. “On the one hand, constantly connected data chains from the supplier to the manufacturer enable the flows of material to be organised more efficiently, meaning supply bottlenecks can be identified early on. On the other hand, digitalisation helps us to strengthen processes for observing environmental protection and human rights standards and to make supply chains even more transparent on these sensitive points.”
Volkswagen will incorporate its years of experience gained from the networking of its global factory structure with the cloud into the development of the data infrastructure of Catena-X. Moreover, the Group will work on specific applications ranging from supply chain optimisation to business partner master data management.
In addition to Volkswagen, 24 other partners from various levels of the automotive value chain are involved in Catena-X, including BMW, Deutsche Telekom, Mercedes-Benz, Robert Bosch, SAP, Siemens and ZF Friedrichshafen. The industry network intends to form a registered association.
