When you come to Wolfsburg, visit the Autostadt. The so-called Auto City is drawing more than 2 Mio visitors per year. Why? The motor vehicle is the star, and the visitor to the Autostadt is its biggest fan. Automobiles, their lovers, and designers meet here: to celebrate the car.
But Wolfsburg is also home to one of the giant car factories in Europe. 60.000 workers and employees work at the VW premises in Wolfsburg, assembling millions of cars. 3 Mio of them were delivered at the other end of the Autostadt: the finished vehicle is released from one of the two car towers and presented to its new owner at the VW Customer Centre.
Customer satisfaction is the top priority at the Autostadt and Volkswagen. A perfectly customized, fun day combined with the crowning highlight: handing over the car keys.
Obscured from the view of the new cars’ owner is the precision clockwork that controls the whole process behind the scenes at the car towers, making all this possible.
Behind the monitor sits Mr Imrock, responsible for process and vehicle control in the ‘Vehicle Preparation’ area. Vehicle Preparation aims to hand over to the customer “the right vehicle, in the right place, at the right time, and with the right equipment”. “It’s straightforward,” as Michael Imrock puts it, even though the screen shows a bewildering amount of data.
The in-house software for vehicle preparation records each vehicle’s process steps and current location on the factory premises—real-time data that enables efficient handling.
“Where the assembly line ends, my work begins,” says Mr Imrock. Vehicles roll out of the factory and get ready for handover in numerous process steps outside the assembly line. Tire changes, refuelling and final checks are just three aspects that must cover before the vehicles are forwarded to the car tower, ready for handover.
This phase, which is crucial for customer satisfaction, requires precision, but especially the reliability of the team, tools, processes, and data. The latter being provided by Asset Agent, a solution from IDENTEC SOLUTIONS. Asset Agent records the time and location of each and every car being prepared and transfers this to the central preparation software to be logically linked and used as part of the information system.
Since Asset Agent is not dependent on external communication infrastructures such as mobile communications or GPS, the solution’s availability exceeds 99.98%.
Source and full article: https://www.identecsolutions.com/volkswagen-asset-agent-rtls
