The powertrain is the mechanism that transmits the drive from the engine of a vehicle to its axle. Our entire concept of mobility depends on the powertrain, because no car, truck, or motorbike can move without it.
Until now, the powertrain was mostly used with combustion engines, which have been used to transport people and goods around the world since the 1860s. The only problem is that combustion engines burn fossil fuels that release greenhouse gases and other pollutants, contributing to global warming and air pollution.
“At Vitesco Technologies, we don’t just talk about transformation, we are the transformation,” said Thomas Buck, CIO, Vitesco Technologies, a company that is leading the development of innovative, efficient electrification technologies for all types of vehicles.
bbSpeaking at the recent SAP Sapphire event in Barcelona, Buck explained how the company is powering the future with clean mobility.
“Our goal is to move from today’s 90% combustion model to a 90% electrified model by 2050,” he said. “Our powertrain technologies cover the systems of today and tomorrow, providing hybrid solutions along the way.”
With 35,500 employees in 50 locations around the globe, the mission of Vitesco Technologies is to reduce the environmental impacts of the automotive industry worldwide and promote emission-free mobility in the long term. This massive task cannot be achieved without continuously evolving technology – be it the engineering kind or the computational kind.
The company is a spinoff from Continental, a German automotive company with a long legacy of innovation in tires, brake systems, vehicle electronics, and much more. Because the powertrain is such a critical element in an automobile, the board made a strategic decision to make it an independent entity, creating Vitesco Technologies, which takes its name from the word “vital.”
“We need to balance electrification with maintaining a profitable core business,” said Buck, referring to the fact that Vitesco Technologies’ profitable combustion business is what will finance the new electrification model. “There are countless challenges and opportunities as we transition to sustainable mobility. Digitalization is a key part of our strategy, and it’s the foundation for leveraging generative AI to enhance business operations.”
The benefits are already apparent. Buck explained that Vitesco inherited a very fragmented ERP landscape, and his team was tasked with harmonizing and migrating to SAP S/4HANA with the RISE with SAP offering. Now, Vitesco Technologies has a platform that will help improve business processes, provide stability and security, and help reduce costs. Being in the cloud will accelerate its other transformation activities.
“We share SAP’s belief that the cloud is the basis for innovation, and we’re using SAP Business Technology Platform to enable low-code and no-code scenarios for employees,” said Buck. “The SAP Datasphere solution will play a significant role in our next steps. We’re really eager to see the first use case with the Joule copilot, SAP’s new generative AI assistant.”
From his perspective as the CIO, Buck sees two critical success factors to be a digital winner. Number one is the ability to adopt new technology quickly, because time to market is crucial. He and his team dedicate a lot of time and thought to speeding up processes.
Buck sees digitalization as a competitive advantage. It’s not enough to digitalize; speed is the differentiator. Cloud computing facilitates on-demand access to scalable computing resources and faster development, testing, and deployment of digital solutions. It starts with basics such as having the right architecture in place.
The second important point is that digitalization must be a company-wide effort. “Every organization in the company must participate to eliminate bottlenecks. Most importantly, you have to make sure everyone has access to relevant data,” he said.
When it comes to generative AI, Buck pointed out that you don’t always need the most complex model for every task. Most people are talking about large language models, but working with a small language model has definite advantages.
A model like ChatGPT handles all the data of the world, so it might work well for generic questions but not in a business context, where you need very specific data.
For example, if you are working in the area of requirements engineering or product development, you may already have a set of specifications, and if you want to add new ones, you’ll just want the model to compare specific sets. At the same time, it’s important to use your own data. Anyone can use a generative AI model, but the quality of your data is what creates the competitive advantage.
“Right now, we’re still learning and experimenting,” said Buck. “The really exciting part will be when we start putting the pieces together and can start visualizing our entire factory in the metaverse, for example, instead of just designing a product in 3D.”
The other exciting aspect of digitalization is that it enables organizations to track a product’s carbon footprint across the supply chain, providing transparency into opportunities for decarbonization, a key element in Vitesco Technologies’ sustainability agenda.
“This is how we are powering the future with clean mobility,” said Buck.
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