The State of Industry X in Automotive

Full Description:

With the support of a unique and powerful consortium of technology companies, the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) investigated the state of Industry X in automotive. Although the research included mostly North American participants, and thus presents a North American perspective, the participating companies are global.

Industry X acknowledges that the pace of change has become so rapid that it no longer makes sense to think of manufacturing and production as advancing in discrete stages. The digital technologies that gave rise to the concept of “Industry 4.0” have continued to improve. No organization can reasonably aspire to adopt a state-of-the-art digital enterprise architecture because “state-of-the-art” is sure to advance by some degree by the time a new enterprise architecture is deployed.

This project presents an ecosystem approach to Industry X research. Industry X is a massive, complex, and rapidly evolving sector. The CAR research team thinks it is unlikely that any entity or individual can fully comprehend the depth and breadth of Industry X. To use a well-worn phrase, it takes a village to implement—and research—Industry X. The CAR Industry X ecosystem team consists of Hardware (Dell and Intel), Data Management (Cloudera), Digital Automation and Analytics (Rockwell Automation and PTC), Consulting (Accenture), and Cloud Infrastructure (Microsoft Azure). These companies provided financial support—but equally important, they provided the CAR research team with unmatched technical and strategic knowledge and perspective. Throughout the project, the CAR researcher’s interaction with the industry and the consortium members proved that no one participant has all the answers. A collaborative ecosystem would be a beneficial environment for all of these stakeholders.