And every company will benefit.” A major driver for innovation “It’s putting Europe first and it’s putting the industry first. It’s not you against me,” says Hagen Heubach, Global Vice President Industry Business Unit Automotive at SAP, one of the technology partners of Catena-X. Catena-X is a new data-sharing network among players at all levels of the automotive industry, based on IDS technology and the data infrastructure Gaia-X. The efforts to achieve such seamless data sharing have led to the rapid growth of Catena-X, the successor organization to the former Automotive Alliance. Only through improved data exchange by all industry players, supply chains can be made more robust. All industry partners, from suppliers to recycling providers to OEMs, need to be better integrated. The key to such integration in the digital economy is equal access to data. In order to weather situations like the current one, he believes there can be no BMW solution or VW or Mercedes solution but only an industry solution. The challenges prompted the European automotive industry to step up its efforts to collaborate better across the value chain. “It sent a clear message to us to stick together in the things that make us more resilient,” says Oliver Ganser. The situation was a wake-up call for the industry.
And when demand bounced back, there were severe short-term shortages of parts and components-most notably, semiconductors. First, demand plummeted amid lockdown after lockdown. But the automobile industry has been hit particularly hard. The COVID crisis has presented industries from all sectors with their own unique challenges.