VW drives productivity and profitability with TI Syncro launch

Volkswagen Group is well on the way to substantially improving its massive engineering, production and after-sales operations globally with the culmination of its projects with SAP, now lumped together as the Automotive Solutions applications set. The carmaker has now launched its TI-Syncro electronic BoMs (bills of materials) system, based on mySAP PLM (product lifecycle management), which it says is already achieving huge cost savings across engineering and production operations. Other big projects being rolled out include: SAP solutions seamlessly linking production, financial and logistics processes to increase efficiency across motor assembly operations; and mySAP CRM (customer relationship management), which is streamlining spare parts fulfilment and collaboration across its European dealership network. TI Syncro is the biggest development. “SAP for Automotive offers the best-suited functionality to help us reach our goals of enhancing efficiency with standardised processes across our global operations,” says Otto Joormann, project manager of TI Syncro at VW. “We needed a single, enterprise-wide system to provide clear, uniform bills of materials to streamline engineering and production workflows. TI-Syncro is a breakthrough solution – one of many innovative technologies that are helping us reduce production costs, increase profit margins, drive after-sales business and better meet customer demands.” In fact, TI-Syncro is the result of two years of co-operative development between VW Group and SAP. In the mid-90’s VW began planning its migration to an integrated system that would improve the reliability and accessibility of its BoMs, providing unified data structures for all engineering, production and service processes. The company chose mySAP PLM to replace more than 10 legacy systems, and it’s now in operation across VW engineering. VW says it’s helping to cut engineering and production costs through error reduction, shorter data entry, retrieval and processing times – and better identification of areas for process improvement. It’s also helping to avoid missing parts and redundancies, while enhancing process reliability and streamlining change management. All component variants, sub-variants etc are already mapped to the PLM electronic variant structure BoM. TI-Syncro shows interrelations in manufacturing processes, determines whether dependencies are maintained correctly in the product structure, and reveals the implications of options and changes. Additionally, the system allows the company to more efficiently develop and produce new models, simplifying the design and approval processes by enabling easy identification of parts that can be implemented, rather than having to reinvent the wheel. TI Syncro will next be deployed globally in stages to span the entire product range of all of VW Group brands. Meanwhile, it’s a similar, although less dramatic picture of improvement at VW’s assembly plant in Poland – where a staff of 980 produces more than 2,250 motors a day for all VW brands. Production, financial and logistics processes are now seamlessly linked under a single SAP system which replaced legacy systems and manual spreadsheet-based processes. That system was implemented by Novasoft, and VW says the system has drastically reduced errors by eliminating redundant, manual data entry between procurement, customs, production and financial processes. Each motor produced now carries a barcode serial number and is carried in a handling unit container, allowing the company to track product throughout its lifecycle. Results include smoother material flow at the plant, and better quality and speed of data, with automatic information delivery to the financial and production databases.