Driving quality together: how OEMs and suppliers transform quality management with Catena-X

The traditional approach to quality management creates significant roadblocks for OEMs and suppliers. Quality data is exchanged manually – often through isolated portals or spreadsheets – making analysis slow and cumbersome. Suppliers, on the other hand, lack access to fleet data, preventing them from identifying and addressing potential problems early on.

The inefficiencies compound over time: integrating suppliers without standardised data models is slow, quality issues often escalate before detection, and the absence of a single source of truth creates unnecessary complexity. This “parts tourism”- shipping parts between locations for investigation – becomes a costly burden for everyone involved.

Catena-X provides the foundation for sovereign, secure, interoperable, and standardized data exchange across the entire value chain. OEMs and suppliers have implemented the Catena-X Quality Management Use Case to transform their approach. This new framework enables OEMs to share fleet data directly with suppliers, empowering them to monitor the performance of their components in a data-driven approach.

Suppliers can now proactively analyze field data and combine it with their own production insights in a standardized way. This shift allows root causes to be identified more quickly, measures to be implemented earlier and validated more effectively, and problems to be contained before escalating further. Importantly, the Catena-X ecosystem ensures that all data exchanges adhere to the highest security and data sovereignty standards, building trust between partners.

Through joint collaboration, the integration of Catena-X standards significantly accelerates the go-live process. What once took months can now be accomplished in a matter of weeks, dramatically improving efficiency.

The implementation of the Catena-X Quality Management use case has delivered tangible results for both the BMW Group and suppliers, creating value across multiple dimensions:

• Faster Detection and Resolution: By sharing field data, errors are now detected an average of 4 months earlier than through traditional methods. This early detection saves not only time but also avoids significant costs—up to a small single-digit million amount for a single component.
• Reduced False Positives: Suspected faults are significantly narrowed down, such as reducing a potential issue in camera systems from 1.4 million vehicles to just 14, saving resources and avoiding unnecessary interventions.
• Accelerated Implementation: The time needed to integrate a component into the system is reduced from several months to 5 weeks for a first go-live. Adding new components from an already onboarded supplier can now be achieved in as little as 2 weeks.
• Stronger Supplier Engagement: Suppliers are now directly involved in fleet monitoring, enabling them to react faster to emerging issues and validate countermeasures more effectively.

These results highlight how collaboration and data transparency eliminate inefficiencies and create significant cost savings across the supply chain. Suppliers can combine field data of their own components, provided by the BMW Group, with their own production insights using Catena-X certified tools such as SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud. This empowers both sides to jointly address quality concerns with speed and precision.

At the core of this success is trust – built on the principles of data sovereignty and transparency. Catena-X ensures that each partner retains full control over their data, deciding what to share with whom and when. 

The shared use of standardized tools and data models has strengthened relationships across the value chain. By consolidating field data and production insights into a single, unified view, both OEMs and suppliers now have the information they need to act quickly and decisively together.

This Catena-X Quality Management Success Story has been started as a data exchange between two players. Soon, the BMW Group, Schaeffler, Bosch and 4 other suppliers will have extended the solution to 10 components, with plans to integrate significantly more partners in the coming years. Future goals include extending Catena-X capabilities to Tier-2 suppliers, further enhancing collaboration and transparency across the entire value chain.

The collaboration between the suppliers and the OEMs through Catena-X has fundamentally changed how quality management is approached. By enabling data exchange, proactive monitoring, and faster root cause analysis, the BMW Group with its partners achieved significant improvements in efficiency, cost savings, and overall product quality.

This success story demonstrates the power of standardized, data-driven collaboration in solving industry-wide challenges. Catena-X not only improves business outcomes for individual participants but also strengthens the entire automotive supply chain.

Together, we are building a more transparent, efficient, and resilient future – one quality improvement at a time.