AWS and the BMW Group are jointly developing new cloud-enabled solutions to increase efficiency, performance, and sustainability across every aspect of the automotive life cycle, from vehicle design to after-sales services. As part of the collaboration, BMW will migrate data from across its business units and operations in over a hundred countries to AWS. The move will encompass a number of the BMW Group’s core IT systems and databases for functions such as sales, manufacturing, and maintenance, with the aim of increasing agility, creating new insights, and innovating new customer experiences.

The two companies will also train up to 5,000 BMW Group-affiliated software engineers in the latest AWS technologies as create as programmes to support the company’s global workforce make better use of data.

Central to its strategy, BMW is working to expand a company-wide data lake built on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), named the “Cloud Data Hub,” so that it can leverage data to deliver innovation across its global businesses.

The Cloud Data Hub provides employees throughout the company with a common operating picture of their entire organisation and a central starting point for new development efforts. From the Cloud Data Hub, BMW Group employees will have access to the breadth and depth of AWS services, including Amazon SageMaker (AWS’s service that helps developers and data scientists build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly in the cloud and at the edge), to process, interrogate, and enrich several petabytes of engineering, manufacturing, sales, and vehicle performance data.

The BMW Group’s third-party partners like car dealerships, suppliers, and technology companies will be able to contribute vehicle operating and maintenance data to the Cloud Data Hub and benefit from insights driven by machine learning. In one example, the BMW Group will apply machine learning to forecast demand for its range of vehicle models and individual equipment on a worldwide scale, as well as optimise planning across its sales, production, and purchasing units to deliver improved customer experiences.

AWS and the BMW Group will also collaborate on improving operational performance and increase transparency in the supply chain. The BMW Group’s PartChain Platform uses AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) in conjunction with open-source blockchain management tools to enhance the traceability of automotive parts and critical raw materials throughout the automotive industry’s highly complex global supply chain. This allows the BMW Group to link specific parts and vehicles to assist in defect investigations, as well as validate that materials are coming from socially responsible sources. The BMW Group is also using Amazon SageMaker to examine data from vehicle subsystems, leveraging machine learning to predict the performance of parts, proactively recommend maintenance, and inform parts suppliers of potential issues with their manufacturing processes to improve quality.

As a core piece of this agreement, the companies will train BMW Group employees to improve their use of data and analytics in their roles and take advantage of the latest cloud technologies.

AWS Professional Services and the BMW Group’s data scientists will work with BMW Group employees to identify business challenges, evaluate emerging technologies, and develop new cloud-enabled solutions for the automotive industry. An example of this effort is the development of a natural language processing solution, optimised for terminology used in the automotive industry, that can automatically extract, process, and translate data from diverse text sources like factory reports, social media, and customer-facing chatbots to provide a more comprehensive view of issues across the BMW Group’s operations and identify insights relevant to customer service, marketing, compliance, maintenance, and related functions. With the support of AWS Training and Certification, the BMW Group plans to train up to 5,000 software engineers affiliated with the company, and certify more than 2,000 of that number, on AWS services, with an emphasis on machine learning and data analytics, to enable the company’s workforce to innovate.

“The BMW Group is driving digitalisation and innovation in the automotive industry,” said Alexander Buresch, CIO and Senior Vice President, BMW Group IT. “We are making data central to the way we work and we look forward to collaborating with AWS to merge our talents, continuing to raise the bar for innovation among automakers and delivering exciting new experiences for our customers around the world.”

“AWS provides the most comprehensive suite of cloud offerings to enable automakers to build applications that touch every point in the customer journey. By combining the domain expertise of the BMW Group with AWS’s demonstrated leadership in the cloud, we’re expanding our impact across the automotive industry so that stakeholders, from parts manufacturers to mechanics, can benefit from greater visibility and insights,” said Matt Garman, Vice President of Sales & Marketing, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “As customer expectations evolve alongside automotive technologies, automakers can rely on AWS to help them seize opportunities and take the lead in areas such as electric and autonomous vehicles, ridesharing, data services, and more.”