Factories usually do not get newspaper heads at technical conferences, but what Audi does in its production abbers is anything but normal. At VMware Explore in Las Vegas I sat down with Dr. Henning Löser, head of the Audi Production Lab, to discuss how the automaker triggers a revolution in his factory floor with a SoftwareFirst approach.
Henning leads a small team that he calls ‘the nerds of production’ joke, but their work is changing how cars are being built. Instead of replacing whole lines for every new piece of technology, Audi has found a way to bring its speed and flexibility into the world of industrial automation. The result is Edge Cloud 4 -production, a system that takes virtualization technology that is usually reserved for data centers and applies it directly to production.
In our conversation, Henning explained why virtual PLCs might be one of the most important breakthroughs. They seem invisible to employees on the line, but they offer maintenance teams new transparency and resilience. We have investigated how to replace thousands of industrial PCs with centralized, virtualized workloads not only reduces downtime, but also reduces energy consumption and streamlining updates. And yes, we even discussed the day on the day that a beaver chewed by one of Audi’s fiber optic cables and how redundancy kept production without problems.
This episode is about more than smart factories. It is about how an industry that is known for heavy machines learns to think like the cloud. From scalability and sustainability to predictive maintenance and AI-ready infrastructure, Audi shows how the car of the future starts with the factory of the future. If you have ever wondered how emerging technologies such as virtualization and private cloud reform the workplace, this is a story that you want to hear.
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