Tread at supports Volkswagen

The Industrial Cloud - which is being developed by Volkswagen together with Amazon Web Services (AWS) - is an open IoT platform combining the data of all machines, plants and systems from all facilities of the Volkswagen Group. Teradata will support Volkswagen by providing cloud-based data analytics to optimize production processes and drive productivity increases in the plants.

"We are delighted to partner with Volkswagen as part of this open industry platform, joining other leading companies in shaping the future of digital production," says Sascha Puljic, Vice President, Central Europe at Teradata. “Our cloud-based data and analytics solution provides comprehensive data intelligence and supports Volkswagen in fully leveraging the value of data in production to increase efficiency and quality."

The aim of the Industrial Cloud is to integrate companies from the entire value chain of the automotive industry, creating a vast partner network that shares data and services so that all partners benefit - including suppliers, technology providers, system integrators, independent software vendors (ISVs), logistics providers and manufacturers. 

In the future, all sensor data and other information will be integrated in the cloud-based platform and analyzed with intelligent algorithms. Relevant data will be made available to partners in the Industrial Cloud, creating enormous potential for optimizing production and logistics processes.

To this endeavor Teradata brings its extensive experience in industrial IoT data analysis, as well as its analytics platform - Teradata Vantage - which is available on AWS. Data analysis from the cloud is used throughout production at Volkswagen to, for example: optimize yield, implement data-based quality assurance and enable predictive maintenance.

Optimizing Production and Driving Productivity

One initial use case that showcases Teradata’s role in supporting Volkswagen’s efforts to improve production processes, is analyzing data from welding procedures in manufacturing:

• First, spot welding data and additional metadata is integrated and analyzed in Teradata Vantage. 
• Using analytical models that include machine learning, Teradata classifies and refines the data based on various quality characteristics. 
• Based on the results, the downstream inspection processes can be optimized, and required rework can be specifically assigned. 
• The outcome is confident, documented quality of the manufactured parts as well as increased efficiency of the production and quality assurance processes.

Another example of Teradata’s future contribution comes from a set of preliminary projects being explored at the Volkswagen Group: Teradata was able to identify additional efficiency potential in production processes, using AI (artificial intelligence). The team analyzed sequence optimization for specific production plants, while also developing quality predictions for manufacturing processes and products.