Alliance for secure and cross-company data exchange in the automotive industry picks up speed.
At the event "Durch Kooperation an die Spitze. Die Automobilbranche gestaltet den digitalen Wandel" of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and the German Association of the Automotive Industry, the initiators of the Automotive Alliance provided information on progress and further details. The founders of the partner network include BMW AG, Deutsche Telekom AG, Robert Bosch GmbH, SAP SE, Siemens AG and ZF Friedrichshafen AG.
In addition to the initiators, Mercedes-Benz AG, BASF SE, Henkel AG & Co. KGaA, Schaeffler AG, German Edge Cloud GmbH & Co. KG, ISTOS GmbH and SupplyOn AG, the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V. and ARENA2036 will participate in the establishment of an open, scalable network for cross-company and secure information and data exchange in the automotive industry. In addition, several small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are already on board.
In future, the Automotive Alliance will operate under the name "Catena-X Automotive Network (Catena-X)". As an output-oriented network and to ensure openness and neutrality, Catena-X plans to organise itself as a registered association. Catena-X sees itself as an expandable ecosystem in which automotive manufacturers and suppliers, dealer associations as well as equipment suppliers, which include application, platform and infrastructure providers, can equally participate. The goal is to create a uniform standard for data and information flows throughout the automotive value chain.
Through standardised information and data availability, the participating companies want to increase the competitiveness of the automotive industry, improve efficiency in industry-specific cooperation and accelerate company processes across the board. A particular focus will also be on SMEs, whose active participation is of central importance for the success of the network. Catena-X is therefore conceived from the outset as an open network with "SME-ready" solutions, in which these are to participate quickly and with low IT infrastructure investments.
In addition, existing structures of the European vehicle industry are to be integrated into the network and further optimised - for example, processes in the area of parts logistics. In addition to efficiency advantages in the supply chain, the network participants expect, for example, more efficient quality and logistics processes, higher transparency with regard to sustainable CO2 reduction and simplified master data management. Continuously connected data chains in this way make it possible to create digital twins of automobiles, on the basis of which innovative business processes and service offers can be developed.
With the International Data Spaces (IDS) standard for data sovereignty, which will also be part of the European cloud data infrastructure Gaia-X, the participating companies have already agreed on essential infrastructure foundations for project implementation.
In the first step, five areas were jointly defined that can make a significant contribution to increasing productivity and higher sustainability along future value chains with the help of a networked data infrastructure: Quality management, logistics, maintenance, supply chain management and sustainability. These are the areas on which Catena-X is focusing its pilot projects. In addition, applications supporting production and development are planned.
The data network will create an important basis so that the industry can meet the challenges of digital transformation even more efficiently and make even better use of the opportunities of digitalisation.
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Responsible for this page is the association Catena-X Automotive Network e.V., see legal notice.