Watch: Bosch's Dr Hanns Bernd Ketteler on digitalisation, AI and cross-functional collaboration in automotive supply chains

"Our industry is in a big phase of change," said Dr Ketteler. "It's about speed, so we have a lot of new technologies and we need to adjust fast to compete with, for example, our colleagues in China who have shown how fast the industry can turn."

He outlined how breakthroughs in the industry – from new technologies such vehicle electrification and autonomous driving – require significant resources and investment.

He also touched on simultaneous engineering, which he described as a "well-established process with a lot of challenges". He spoke about how digitalisation can support data-driven decision-making, explaining that digital twins can make communication between functions easier, faster and more efficient.

"Artificial intelligence is now a tool that is used in parctically all functions," Dr Ketteler. stated. He gave examples, including the use of AI to enhance simultaneous engineering work, to improve technical processes in manufacturing, to optimise logistics processes and to increase the accuracy of forecasts of market demands.

"We are in the middle of a revolution," he said with regards to AI, noting that today it is very common. "The beginning is already far behind us."

Despite the seemingly boundless potential of technologies like AI, Dr Ketteler was keen to emphasise the continued importance of the human factor in automotive manufacturing and logistics. "Even though we talk a lot about technology and digitalisation, in the end it is about the people," he said. 

Dr Ketteler added: "We need to make sure that our colleagues and our teams think in a true end-to-end [way] and not just in functional terms." By having colleagues rotate roles across functions and doing this from the very beginning he said that "multi-functional" teams can be built, capable of "working together with a complete end-to-end logic".

Read more from Automotive Manufacturing Solutions here.