BMW Group: AI innovation in the automotive industry

Manufacturing Global sat down with BMW Group’s Head of Artificial Intelligence Innovation, Matthias Schindler, at the Connected Manufacturing Leaders Summit in Berlin. At BMW Group, artificial intelligence plays an important role in leveraging insights from smart data analytics. Head of Artificial Intelligence Innovation, Matthias Schindler leads these efforts across BMW’s production system at 31 sites in 15 countries all over the world. We are focused on object detection to improve quality. We’re aiming to reduce rework, accelerate systems and improve our production processes. In general, we only focus on production, so not the car or product development itself, but all facets of production, including all the technology - starting from press shop, through the body shop and paint shop, to the final assembly, and all the support functions along that production journey. Schindler explains that improving quality inspection has several strands across the production process. We want to make it all more robust, he says. The automated inspections we have implemented so far allow us to check the configuration of the car is correct as far as the customer order is concerned. We have one billion possibilities to configure with the new BMW 3 Series.