Empowering SMEs with Catena-X – The Battery Podcast S01E13 – Transcript
The battery industry is not a single type of business, it is a network of connected business from manufacturers to OEMs. In episode thirteen of the Battery Podcast, you can learn how Catena-X is helping these businesses accelerate their innovative products and processes.
Nick Finberg
It’s time for another episode of the Battery Podcast from Siemens Digital Industries and we have another great discussion from Hannover Messe, for everyone that can’t make it to these in person events. For this discussion we have Frank Göller – Head of Digital Strategy and Portfolio in Production at Audi AG – and Claus Cremers – Director of Automotive Ecosystems at Siemens AG. But maybe more important to their discussion both are members of the board for Catena X. Let’s tune in to hear a little bit about creating an ecosystem for batteries and production.
Chris Brow
Welcome Frank and Claus.
Frank Göller
Hi, good to see you.
Claus Cremers
Hi, nice to meet you.
Chris Brow
Welcome. So have a seat gentlemen, wherever. Comfortable, isn’t it? Very comfortable. It’s nice to be here. Hello. Great to have you both with us. Frank, tell us a bit about what you do at Audi on a daily basis. Just one or two sentences.
Frank Göller
One or two sentences. Okay, so I’m responsible for the digital strategy in production logistics. This means we try to really make the digital transformation from the traditional manufacturing to the more smart and digital production. And additionally, I’m responsible within Catena X for internationalization and to drive, to grow our community.
Chris Brow
Thank you very much for that. And Claus, how about you?
Claus Cremers
Yes, Siemens is a pioneer in Catena X together with Volkswagen and many others. And I have the big honor to represent Siemens in this ecosystem in the board of directors and our association. And my other role in Siemens is being the director for automotive ecosystems, because we of course as Siemens need to understand ecosystems and also work together with our partners and customers in ecosystems.
Chris Brow
All right. Thank you very much for sharing that. We’re going to jump right into an important question, which I think is very, very crucial, obviously for OEMs like Audi or Volkswagen, the Volkswagen group in general. What are the main, let’s say challenges on the one side and the goals on the other side when dealing with Catena X?
Frank Göller
It’s a big question, but very relevant and important for us as an OEM. If we take a look into the last five years, the world really dramatically changed. That means it started all around with the crisis on COVID. We had really issues in the supply chain with the Ever Given in the Suez Canal. So there were several issues and then heading up to the semiconductor crisis. So we really recognize that the supply chain is crucial for us, but it’s also not possible to manage it in a right way. And therefore Catena X is jumping in because we need more transparency. We need more control on critical material, on scarce material. And therefore we also have to think about how to optimize the supply chain and how to optimize the flows from the mine to the recycling process because the OEM is not the end of the modern supply chain. Because finally we have to think about recycling, bringing the critical and the scarce material back. And therefore Catena X plays a very significant role for us as an OEM, but also for the suppliers and the partners in the supply chain.
Chris Brow
Very ambitious, I guess we could say. Claus, from your perspective, what do you think does it take to scale the ecosystem?
Claus Cremers
Scaling the ecosystem is the question we try to answer later. And also we want the ambitious goal here on our booth to really push the applications, activate the small and medium companies together with the OEMs for the internationalization. But let’s come to one example. And Frank, maybe you can just explain because I think it’s important to go with concrete examples for this dimension. And Frank, we have this radar here of regulations, right? What’s the problem with it?
Frank Göller
Yeah, good question. Thanks. And I forgot to mention that because if we see how the supply chain is working, we also see it’s not only the material flow, but it’s also the regulation coming up from the US, from the EU, in China. There are several regulations we have to take care of. And if we take, for example, only the battery pass, the battery pass, we need over 100 single data sets from the miner up to the recycling process. And if we don’t have a proper process to deliver those topics, those single information in the right way, on a trusted way, we will fail. We cannot bring our cars to the market because the regulation will say, no, you cannot offer that product to the market. And that’s only the beginning because a battery pass, it’s a product pass and a battery is one element of a car, but a car has several elements and several products. So therefore, thousands of product passes will follow. And we have made the investigation that up to the year 2030, there are millions of data sets we have to collect, we have to archive and we have to deliver to the regulation so that we can really fulfil all the laws and the requirements given by our governments.
Chris Brow
Wow. And I can imagine that’s only going to basically expand, like that’s going to be more and more and more, all these regulations that you have to basically oblige to, which takes kind of like the energy away from your actual job as building cars. You know what I mean? But this is exactly where Catena X again comes into play to make life easier when it comes to that.
Claus Cremers
Yeah, we want to make it cost efficient, of course, because it’s a shared burden. Every OEM has to issue those passports. So it’s a shared burden. Everyone has to do it. And why should everyone do it for themselves? Right. So you can just share the burden, try to find a system that’s called Catena X to really standardize the data sets, standardize the way we speak to each other. It’s like a language book, right? And we implement into the tool and now the language. So we put every word by word into this tool and everyone understands it. Yeah. And just, Frank, maybe to give an impression about where the data comes from and who’s all involved. We have another slide, right?
Chris Brow
Right. Check it out.
Frank Göller
I mentioned that before that we really have to collect all the all the data points from the miner up to the recycling. And the interesting thing is at the end, we have a dynamic digital twin. So if I talk to Claus very often, we say digital twin is the future of a digital transformation because we really have to just simulate what is happening.
Chris Brow
Right.
Frank Göller
And you can make a prediction.
Chris Brow
Right.
Frank Göller
And this is one of the first fully fledged digital twins we are developing, collecting the data and also collecting the dynamic data. How is the battery used? How often it is charged? What is the state of material in the battery? What is the heating status or the temperature status? So it’s really a new way to think about our products and to have it digitalized.
Chris Brow
Interesting. So once again, a bit about the challenges obviously and the goals. Now we’re going to talk about the ecosystem, about scaling it a bit.
Claus Cremers
We can talk about the ecosystem. So if you see, this is already the ecosystem we talk about, right? It’s 300,000 companies globally. Later we speak a little bit about how we approach it globally. We have to go. We went together to China. We go to the US. We try to grow hubs everywhere on the globe for Catena X, make everyone comprehend what’s it all about and then try to make the hurdle to jump over, especially for the small and medium companies, very, very low, especially with this very well comprehensive applications. Right. And an ecosystem is not something where just one vendor would conquer the world. An ecosystem needs many parties. And at the moment we are setting the scene. We are building the level playing field where new market starts to grow, a market of consumers and users of the applications to fulfill the problem here. And on the other hand, we need many companies who build applications.
Chris Brow
The more companies, the better, basically.
Claus Cremers
Yeah, more companies the better. But we need some ingredients for it, right? We need ingredients to build applications. And therefore we came up with the idea to build keep it together things, kits. Yeah. And the kits, maybe I can show you the kits here.
Chris Brow
Yeah, let’s go for it.
Claus Cremers
Frank, you may maybe you can you can start with the kits.
Frank Göller
Yeah. What what Claus said is very important. If we have a lot of companies together, we have to bring together their ideas and their requirements and those kits. They are representing initial standards based on open source technology and software that we really have shared understanding how we want to how we want to tackle a problem. For example, if we all have to track carbon footprint. So that’s the question. How do you measure carbon footprint? Is there a rule? No, there was no rule. But we said together with the company said, how do we want to calculate it? How do we want to measure it? And then one of the first kit we have developed and one standard is a rule book, how to measure carbon footprint and how to make it applicable and available all around the world so that a company in the US is calculating in the same way like in Europe or like in Asia.
Chris Brow
Yeah.
Frank Göller
And that’s important because at the end, we need one number.
Chris Brow
Right.
Frank Göller
And apples plus peas is not working. We need Apple plus apples. And that is delivered within one of those kits and other kit on on circular economy.
Chris Brow
Right.
Frank Göller
I talked about critical and scarce material. Circular economy is helping us to really round and round and bring the material in circles to really reuse it very often. And we have systematics developed together how we want to do it and how we want to track it.
Chris Brow
So to stay in the metaphor of the ingredients you named before, this is kind of like a like a meal prep.
Claus Cremers
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Chris Brow
It’s like it’s prepped already. You got everything to go. You don’t have to worry about the single ingredients because you thought of it beforehand. Put it all together in these different kits. Anyway, but I kind of get the idea. I hope you do also. So you told us last year that it’s all there and it’s ready for business. Right. If there are customers here in the room now, where can we get where can they get more information about this?
Claus Cremers
That’s a good question. And of course, there are many vendors in the ecosystem selling applications certified by Catena X. And of course now Siemens is one of it. And we play the ecosystem. So under my Catena X shirt here, I of course have my Siemens shirt. So this is what we call ecosystem. Yeah. You always have the shared burden, but you want to do business and Siemens uses the kits, utilizes the kits, builds applications and certifies the applications with the respective kits. And we have here two streams. I just showed you some of our applications. One stream is the sustainability stream.
Chris Brow
Okay.
Claus Cremers
What Frank just explained, you need to calculate the product footprint in the product. So this is what we can do with our Teamcenter solution. Then of course, if you have the product calculated, you need to get the data from the supply chain because we all know the biggest portion of the CO2 emissions come from the supply chain. That’s why we developed SiGreen.
Chris Brow
Are they willing to give that data just so free or is that one of the challenges also to build up that trust in between? Just a question.
Claus Cremers
Frank, just go ahead.
Frank Göller
Very good question. And short story from the beginning of our board work together where we started in the Catena X board, there was one very important sentence. We have to develop from an ecosystem to ecosystem. And it was so visible to see that all the companies there, Siemens, Porsche, Audi, Volkswagen, BMW, and so on. We really had one agenda and we really say we want to play on eye level. It’s win-win. So it’s not the old system that the OEM gives the pressure down to the system. No, we have really to create win-win situations. And if I share important data, I also want to have the sharing with my partner on the same level. We cannot push or force a number one to give me the data, but I keep it for me. It’s really give and take.
Chris Brow
I like what you said before. It’s moving from an ego to an ecosystem. So take out the G, put in the C.
Claus Cremers
That’s it. Exactly. And the incentive scheme for all companies is not only the regulation fulfillment story. It’s also about doing business together, increasing the quality, being able to digitally work together with the OEM, with the supplier network, speaking the same language. This is our broad idea. And of course, if you start with the battery passport, for example, you will end up in the product passport with millions of new applications and new possibilities and really earn money. Think about financial aspects. What is happening to the battery after the end of life? You can maybe earn more money if you know what’s inside this battery. So this is just one next level application, one business model that brings business to other companies.
Chris Brow
And by the way, the the passport, the battery passport you’re talking about is part of the SiGreen ecosystem also, right?
Claus Cremers
SiGreen is delivering the CO2 data. The battery passport needs more data and the battery passport will receive the data, for example, the CO2 data, but other data is away from the supply chain. Store it forever as long as the battery lives. And for example, the OEM Volkswagen Audi has to issue this passport and Siemens is offering a passport to other companies as well. So this is why you asked me, is it live? Yes, it’s live. We have the SiGreen solution, we have the battery passport, we have many others also here on the fair today.
Claus Cremers
I have a picture for that before you kick us from the stage.
Chris Brow
Don’t worry, we have another minute.
Claus Cremers
This one is very important, very important. And I really want to emphasize on that.
Frank Göller
And that’s really important because here are sitting two bigger companies like Siemens and Volkswagen, but Catena X is not for the big companies. We only are successful if the small and medium sized companies can quickly and easily onboard and be activated. And therefore we are going around the world, we’re talking the US to companies and to associations. We talked to in Asia, in China, in Japan, in Europe to really build local hubs because this is a federated system. It’s not centralized. It’s not driven by Germany because in the beginning they said, oh, that’s a German thing. No, it’s a global initiative. And our processes are developed that way that it’s automatically to be onboarded, that it’s activated easily. So a small company easily can join and that’s the power to really grow it.
Chris Brow
And you have the power obviously as a big company once again to set a signal.
Frank Göller
Exactly.
Chris Brow
I think that’s important also. Once again, if the big players are onboard, then the others will probably follow also. Our time is up. You know where to find them. Let’s give them a big round of applause. Frank and Claus, thank you for joining us.
Frank Göller
Thank you.
Claus Cremers
Thank you.
Nick Finberg
Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Battery Podcast. To learn more about Catena X check out the link in the episode description and while you’re there make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. Or take a deeper dive in battery on our website siemens.com/battery.
