Leveraging Cloud Computing Technologies- A Case Study of Volkswagen

Leveraging Cloud Computing Technologies- A Case Study of Volkswagen

Company Overview

Volkswagen is the leading automobile manufacturers in Germany. It was started in the 1937by the German government to manufacture in mass the low priced cars for people. The company is headquartered in Germany at Wolfsburg.  The military involvement of Volkswagen made the factory to the critical target of Allied bombers.  In the end Nazi war, the company was ruined entirely.  Volkswagen was later in the year 1946, constructed under the supervision of the British (Atiyeh, 2017). The company control was moved to the West German government as well as in the Lower Saxony state. During that period, nearly half of the cars which were produced were Volkswagen.  In the year 1950, the production of Volkswagen augmented, and there was the introduction of transporter vans.  The sales in foreign states went higher as several countries preferred the model.   The competition from other manufacturers of small cars having new modern designs has increasingly placed the company in trouble. This has made Volkswagen transform its organizational philosophy towards manufacturing current as well as sportier models of cars.

Consequently, in the year 1970s, Volkswagen commenced doing away with cars with the designs of front-engine in addition to the ones with front-wheel drives. From that period, Volkswagen has produced multiple car models treasured by car lovers. The key models which have been hugely sold for the past times are Golf, which dominated the USA market, replacing Beetle to become the ultimate Volkswagen-which is the excellently model of sale globally.

With all those mentioned, Volkswagen being an automotive industry, have operating systems, applications which are cloud indigenous, internet of software, which are used for the development methods. Volkswagen is utilizing the open-source platform of cloud computing in building private clouds to host websites in support of the company’s brands such as Audi and Porsche (Atiyeh, 2017).  The company is one of the multiple automobile industries leveraging cloud computing technologies in support of their digital future to improve its profitability.

Challenges

The profitability of Volkswagen has been hampered by problems that are not limited to an increase in competition amongst automotive sectors, balancing between demands of government and technologies, industrial transformations, and the Chinese marketplace. Most of the global automakers face stiff competition in the Chinese market. For the past 15 years, China has been winning various bets within automotive industries. China has been registering double-digit increment in sales, which has made most of the automotive firms in China to be intensely in competition with the other global industries. Another challenge is the evolution of the automotive industry.

With the advancement of technology, the creation of connected cars serves as a communication hub that transmits alongside receives data as well as information as of the surroundings (Riasanow, Galic & Böhm, 2017). Autonomous driving is made possible through connectivity. The connected cars have been created fresh opportunities for the automobile industries.  Connected cars promote excellent customer care, warranty costs low congestions, and low insurance premiums. However, this form of cars leads to market uncertainties.  The problem is whether automakers will navigating towards the market uncertainties and deliver to the market the cars which are connected. Volkswagen also faces increased competition from multiple automotive industries in the world. Seemingly, the auto sales flattening within several mature marketplaces like Europe and Japan. The automaker is facing intensified competition in every market share pie. Finally, Volkswagen has been attempting to balance several demands placed demands of powertrain development versus government needs.

To overcome the challenges discussed above, Volkswagen utilizes the technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing from AWS (Amazon Web Services). Through the use of the two techniques, the company connects as well as manages its supply chains and manufacturing plants—the industrial cloud of Volkswagen assists in maintaining the giant’s automotive manufacturing in addition to its logistics. The system aggregates instant data attained from the 122 manufacturing plants of Volkswagen to manage the general effectiveness of the assembled equipment. What is more, the system performs tracking of spare parts and the entire vehicles assembled. It is connected to nearly 31,000 facilities alongside 1,600 partners and suppliers of Volkswagen (Riasanow, Galic & Böhm, 2017).  The IoT services are used for establishing, collecting, and organizing data. Furthermore, the system is used in running data analytics that is sophisticated from the floor of the plant to improve the efficiencies of all the processes in the company.

Solution

The industrial cloud of Volkswagen with Amazon Web Service combined data from every machine used the plants. It also includes systems from every facility of the group of Volkswagen.  The implementation of cloud computing led to the improvement of productivity at the plant significantly. The integration supply chain of the Volkswagen globally with cloud computing, in the long run, assist in the connection of with suppliers and various manufacturing locations (Verbitski et al., 2017). The open-source platform could be used possibly by other partners in futuristic times.  The use of industrial cloud computing aided in the generation of fresh prospects in support of process optimization within the production lines. Thus, it permitted considerable improvements in productivity at the plants.  The industrial cloud computing of Volkswagen, therefore, created an essential prerequisite for attaining production goals.  Through leveraging AWS technology, Volkswagen made an open industry platform where all the partners from the automobile industry could converge in the future.  Implementing cloud computing improved the efficiency of products and services delivered as well as promoting the real-time meetings of all the partners of the industry. All this did not happen in a fall short, but in the long term, Volkswagen would be able to meet its objectives through the use of cloud computing (Riasanow, Galic & Böhm, 2017).

Conclusion

From this paper, the most important ideas include the use of industrial cloud computing and the IoT services offered to Volkswagen.  By the development of industrial clouds in Volkswagen, the company made a foundation for digitizing its logistics and production tendencies. At the production point, cloud computing employed by Volkswagen controlled systems equipment and types of machinery.  Integration of cloud computing standardized as well as networked in all the Volkswagen’s 122 production plants. Nowadays, there exists a distinction between individual plants within the Volkswagen Group.  However, the automotive plant should improve quality throughout its global operations to make the company competitive as compared to other firms like Toyota. Better quality certainly would lead to an increment in sales, efficiency in production, thus overall satisfaction of customers. Better quality similarly serves as a great word-of-mouth advertisement, as there would be many returning customers for the same product.

References

Atiyeh, C. (2017). Everything You Need to Know About the Volkswagen Diesel-Emissions Scandal. Retrieved from http://blog.caranddriver.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-vw-diesel-emissions-scandal

Riasanow, T., Galic, G., & Böhm, M. (2017). Digital transformation in the automotive industry: Towards a generic value network.

Verbitsky, A., Gupta, A., Saha, D., Brahmadesam, M., Gupta, K., Mittal, R. … & Bao, X. (2017). Amazon Aurora: Design considerations for high throughput cloud-native relational databases. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Conference on Management of Data (pp. 1041-1052).