BMW Group and Microsoft Partner to Build “Smart Factories”
AutohausAZ, a top retailer for high-quality Land Rover auto parts online and other luxury car parts, is excited to provide exciting news and useful information regarding the world of automobiles. In this post, we will discuss the partnership between the BMW Group and Microsoft and the future of vehicle manufacturing and technology.
Earlier in April, the BMW Group and Microsoft announced their partnership in order to launch and implement Microsoft’s Open Manufacturing Platform (OMP), an open-sourced industrial manufacturing platform, in order to meet the car manufacturer’s need to create a more streamlined, synchronized, and automated manufacturing system for the BMW’s fully autonomous and electric iNext vehicle. The goal is to create the ultimate “smart factory” where Henry Ford’s assembly line would effectively be put to shame.
The OMP uses Microsoft’s Azure cloud, which BMW has already been utilizing in over 3,000 machines, as well as in advanced IoT and AI systems, across 30 production sites worldwide. BMW is working in a way that may transform the car manufacturing industry and send it speeding into the future. As a rule, this industry has taken a guarded, proprietary approach to what products are being produced and how they are being manufactured. For years, manufacturing companies have used proprietary systems specific to their companies, making it hard to modify and nearly impossible to use alongside other proprietary systems.
This mine-not-yours mentality is a curse of the industry and has been slowing down technology and transportation evolution for years because each company uses their own systems and spends millions of dollars attempting to replicate and/or improve competitors’ tech and designs - in a way, they are reinventing the wheel over and over again. According to BMW and Microsoft, this business model needs a facelift.
The OMP is designed as a foil to the status quo, adhering to the “sharing is caring” ideology. This open-source platform is attempting to, quite literally, write the book on new technology and manufacturing processes. By the creation of an open-technology structure and a cross-industry community, the OMP will make the future of technology evolution bright by allowing the tech of multiple industries to be available for use and improvement by other industries. Members of this “community” of manufacturing and production leaders will have increased opportunities to unlock their technological potential, securely build and implement their ideas, and benefit from what they may learn from other industries and organizations.
In terms of the automakers, technology in the realm of self-driving cars and their production is advancing quickly. If the auto industry kept up their attempts to outdo one another and keep their secrets, the industry would begin to hurt and eventually fail. The OMP allows sample code for certain products available for all members. Private organizations can use that tech as is or tinker with it to improve it for their own ends, but they do not need to start from scratch.
BMW and Microsoft plan to have four to six companies use the Open Manufacturing Platform by 2020, and we at AutohausAZ, your go-to source for buying genuine BMW auto parts online , are crossing our fingers in the hope that this auto-tech partnership will blaze the way towards industry and manufacturer collaboration for new technology and an improved world.
