How Does Catena-X Strengthen the Automotive Supply Chain?

The transformation of the automotive industry is in full swing. Electric vehicles replace combustion engines. Circular economy is becoming real and more resources will be recycled. Digitalization creates completely new opportunities to fulfill customer wishes, to make production processes more climate-friendly and generally increases competitive pressure. Nevertheless, the automotive sector is also facing challenges and problems, from low resource availability to long production times. External impacts, such as geopolitical disputes, pandemics, and climate change, have become major challenges on the automotive supply chain. These are all challenges that no company can meet on its own today.

---

Together with some of the major players in the automotive industry, Siemens has joined forces to form the global partner network Catena-X, to enable the digital flow of information across the entire supply chain. Catena-X is the first integrated, collaborative, open data ecosystem for the automotive industry of the future. It connects all players to end-to-end value chains with the goals of strengthen resilience, improve sustainability, enable mass customization, and boost efficiency of the automotive supply chain. Many suppliers in the automotive industry are extremely uncertain about the added value of sharing their data and rate the risk of data loss or the negative consequences of so-called lock-in effects as very high. Consequently, there is a lack of business models, incentive mechanisms and the right technology.  Therefore, the idea behind Catena-X is to connect automotive manufacturers, suppliers, and service providers of the entire supply chain. Within this cycle, we as Siemens bring in our expertise as IT/OT supplier for a much more resilient supply chain.

As one of the first participating partners of Catena-X, Siemens is supporting the development of the technology for the open, cross-company system today. We are especially taking on the main challenges and core topics of Catena-X: circular economy, traceability, and sustainability.
 Our goal is to close the circular economy loop through a digital ecosystem, to enable circular strategies and recover valuable components, as well as materials for smart circular economy. We see product transparency and the recovery of strategic materials as two key enablers to cope with the current and upcoming circularity challenges.
We offer a trusted traceability, making the genealogy of the product visible along the whole value chain, taking data sovereignty into account. It links, stores, and makes data accessible – from production and the whole value chain.
With over 90% of emissions in the automotive industry originating in supply chain, decarbonizing is a cross-company challenge. We support driving decarbonization, by making product carbon footprints actionable with primary and comparable data from the supply chain exchanged in the Catena-X network. SiGREEN provides this necessary basis for targeted emission management and connects relevant data ecosystems, as well as the IT and OT backend infrastructure.
The Catena-X data ecosystem will increase the resilience and flexibility of the supply chain. Therefore, we are working on solutions for the supply chain and beyond which are elements of a ‘Catena-X Resilience KIT’ Via this “resilience KIT”, we offer solutions to create a multi-vendor, interoperable, innovative, and scalable ecosystem. An important feature is the real time online simulation of the complete logistic chain, as well as the possibility to modularize the production itself with ‘modular production’. A final function of the KIT is to supply parts as a service with manufacturing as a service.  

As one of the pioneers of Catena-X, we are proud of taking part on developing the technology for the open, cross-company system today.