Wolfsburg, Germany

The VW Group consists mainly of four independent companies VOLKSWAGEN, AUDI, SEAT and SKODA. In addition to these there are many other production, distribution, financial, and service-rendering companies within the Group around the world. In the field of Information Systems, the Volkswagen Group is supported by its own company division VW-GEDAS. With operations spanning the globe, the VW Group is today a truly European manufacturer, characterised by a division of market activities between the individual Group companies. The VW Group spends approximately 1,000 million EURO annually on worldwide research and development and employs a RTD staff of approximately 12,000. In the period to March 31, 1999 the Volkswagen Group increased it’s world-wide production volume to 1,255,581 vehicles. The average number of employees increased to over 300,000. The group’s investments remain at a high level totalling about 3,216 million EURO.

One aim of the VW Group is to reinforce its position as a truly international enterprise in order to ensure that it will remain competitive in the next century, particularly in the light of the opportunities offered by the Europe of the future. A few of the factors that will sharpen competition in the next decade are: 1. The emergence of Eastern Europe as a market and product base; 2. Increased European and world-wide investment and no formal restraints on car imports into Europe in the near future; 3. A probable shake-out among the big six European car makers; 4. A necessity to develop "green" cars that are better for the environment, more efficient, and safer. These kinds of challenges place a high priority on innovative production processes. Time to market is a vital component for an automobile company’s success and CAx is one of the efficient instruments of reaching the goal of getting high quality and moving a new car from the design concept approval to volume production in less than 32 months.

The main area of interest within the PICK project is the further building of know-how in transferring of knowledge by efficient methods and tools to support process improvement in different departments and plants of Volkswagen. This know-how should also been used for training of experts and new employees.

The basic role of Volkswagen as one of the three end user within PICK will be to define requirements, support specification and demonstrate the developed ICT support tools for the PI concepts in the automotive industry. Volkswagen will mainly demonstrate the business case "sharing of knowledge gathered within different product life cycle sectors" and contribute to solving the main RTD problem of managing experience-based corporate knowledge. They will also strongly address problem solving approaches for the generation of the effective PI plans and ‘learning from experience’.

http://www.volkswagen.com