Digital Natives of Industry 4.0 - Case of e.GO
In the manufacturing world, people tend to ignore the potential of digital natives and their disruptive impact.
e.GO, a German automobile start-up, achieved spectacular Industry 4.0 maturity in less than five years since its foundation in 2015.
All aspects of e.GO’s story is embellished with disruptive innovation as a coherent suite of strategic choices, manifesting signs of visionary leadership. Prof. Günther Schuh, e.GO’s founder is an academic, an entrepreneur, and an industrialist.
e.GO focuses on short-range urban transportation, an underserved and less contested niche of the automobile market. e.GO’s vision is to make electric cars and minibusses affordable to the masses such that the company can help human civilization reduce carbon emissions faster. Interestingly, at its core, e.GO is a mobility solution provider developing data-based business models and business apps around multimodality and traffic bundling.
Enter the Internet of Production (IoP)
The great leadership, strategy, and innovation at e.GO could not go without a state-of-the-art engineering and production system. e.GO has created its own unique approach to Industry 4.0. With the advantage of being a start-up without legacy inertia, e.GO started with a clean IT architecture that unifies the product life cycle and the production system into a seamless whole. e.GO calls this architecture Internet of Production (IoP).
IoP is Simple and Intuitive
The foundation of IoP is the collection of data on all physical assets, such as machines, tools, sensors, or products. Typical enterprise applications are connected to an internet-of-things middle layer. In the middle layer of IoP, the data is refined, integrated, and served to use case-based endpoints on the decision support layer at the top. As you can see below, IoP covers all stages of value creation. Data flows freely, and there is no room for analog information.
Hyperfast Iterative Development
Being a start-up, e.GO does not have deep pockets. Thus, agility and efficiency are mandatory. Thanks to the unified information architecture, e.GO can apply agility by iterating both on the product and on processes with feedback loops shorter than a day, sometimes within an hour or even in minutes. The unified information architecture fosters agile principles, reduces overall IT costs, and enables citizen developers. IoP offers open real-time access to all systems vertically and horizontally. Thus, citizen developers enabled with IoP can develop apps in minutes. This is what e.GO calls the “app factory approach.” The apps do not replace the functions of the conventional IT systems in the company but rather complement them where the standard systems reach their limits. Consuming information across systems is significantly simplified through IoP-based apps.
As IoP depicts, it digitalizes the life cycle of products as an integral part of value creation. With digital shadows of each car it produces in a digital ecosystem, eGO can offer digital innovations at unimaginable speeds in the conventional automobile industry.
All in all, IoP elegantly enables e.GO’s vision is to offer affordable electromobility solutions made in Germany, a high-wage country and the origin of the I4.0 concept.
IoP is a Closed Loop Information System
In conventional IT architecture, information is pushed from product development to production and to the customer in a one-way street. With IoP architecture, the automated feedback loops from individual products enable real-time iterative product development. e.GO calls this “closing the loop”. Through these iterative bidirectional processes, the company’s agility is significantly increased through faster information flow and data-backed decisions.
To illustrate, for e.GO, the weight of the vehicle is critical for its performance. With the help of a weight management app and granular weight data in PLM, designers can make design decisions completely using virtual design and testing tools. This and other similar functionalities make the design process efficient, fast, agile, transparent, and traceable.
Thanks to the integration between PLM, e-commerce, and shop floor, e.GO can seamlessly fulfill online sales of configure-to-order products with a one-piece flow across the supply chain. With the help of a single sales configurator on the company’s website, the product is tailored to the customer‘s needs. Orders are processed in a connected web store and automatically forwarded to the planning system.
Another good example is about the user experience and how the usage and utilization data are leveraged in product development. The horizontal connectivity of IoP provides the usage and utilization data necessary to improve the product continuously by using this field data, e.GO deeply understands how its cars are used and stressed during short-distance drives in urban traffic. These insights are used to improve the customer experience continuously and iteratively.
Moreover, the IoP allows seamless and modular integration of all systems. Hence, modular expansion of IoP is simple, such that 3rd party software can be integrated into IoP at record speeds.
Positioned to Collaborate
e.GO’s success story wouldn’t be possible without the unique ecosystem of the RWTH Aachen Campus, which hosts more than 400 technology companies. Positioned in the RWTH Aachen, e.GO leverages the collaboration-oriented culture of the campus and easy access to the best scientists and industry experts from all disciplines it needs. On the other hand, e.GO brought an inspiring vision to the ecosystem that attracted young talent and teams of scientists who, in turn, jointly developed e.GO concept as an industry consortium.
Lessons From e.GO
Industry 4.0 requires true leadership and vision.
e.GO focuses on the speed of progress over the speed of actions, thus e.GO preferred developing capabilities instead of episodical wins.
Industry 4.0 requires strategy. To illustrate, e.GO is not only a faster and more efficient company, but it deliberately targets a less contested market and creates competitive advantage with its digital solutions and services ecosystem. Also, e.GO serves with environmental consciousness and creates jobs in a high-wage country.
Industry 4.0 requires digital transformation. Transformation, by definition, is about changing the form and structure, not the surface. For a manufacturing company, digital transformation starts at the information architecture (IA) of value creation. Anything that does not change the IA is not transformational. Do not mistake digital use cases for digital transformation if the IA is left unchanged.
Industry 4.0 requires systems design. In short, apps work on systems, and systems are composed of software, processes, things, and people. And systems run on IA. Do not mistake apps for systems. Good apps running on bad systems are like cherries in mud.
Do not mistake information architecture for data architecture. Do not become a data-rich information-poor company.
Originally published in ISE Magazine in April 2021, co-authored with Dr. Thomas Gartzen.
