At the core of Volkswagen Group’s decision to build an ‘Industrial Cloud’ connecting its production sites and supply chain, is an extreme proliferation of systems, standards and software across its 120 factories. Today, the group uses around 1,500 different IT systems on the shopfloor alone for manufacturing and logistics. It is not uncommon for a single plant to operate with dozens of different systems – hundreds once suppliers and service providers are included.

This “spaghetti connectivity”, as Volkswagen Group CIO Martin Hofmann calls it, is not only confusing and burdensome to manage, but it limits the degree to which investment, innovation and data can be shared across the group. Information exists in pockets of the production network, while software applications are not always compatible across locations.