Volkswagen Will Build Its Own B-2-B Marketplace

Autoparts Report, April 25, 2000

Volkswagen AG, IBM Corp., and the U.S. software companies, i2 Technologies and Ariba, have agreed to form a partnership to build a global digital marketplace.

"With this partnership we accelerate our current activities to optimize our business process," said Jens Neumann, the Volkswagen board member responsible for group strategy, legal matters, treasury, and organization.

An important aspect of the process improvement is the interactive transaction process with the suppliers. The new e-market will enable Volkswagen to order certain groups of products via the Internet. This includes manufacturing parts and tools.

With this cooperation agreement, Volkswagen said it intends to increase the efficiency in its global supply chain and improve its process flow. "In some cases this could lead to savings of up to 50 percent of process costs," explained Francisco Javier Garcia Sanz, VW board member for procurement.

With this move, Volkswagen will not join the Internet alliance of the three U.S. car manufacturers. "With IBM, i2, and Ariba we will cooperate with the leading providers of e-market and supply chain management technologies," explained Neumann.

With the new virtual marketplace Volkswagen sees the chance of creating a broad European standard.