Building an AI Ready Factory: How Software Defined Production Is Transforming Manufacturing

Edge Cloud for Production in Large Scale Manufacturing From Hardware Centric to Software Defined Production Operating in Highly Automated Production Environments Why Infrastructure Matters for AI in Manufacturing Enabling IT/OT Convergence with an Edge Cloud Foundation What You’ll Learn in the ARC White Paper Read the ARC Advisory Group White Paper: Building Audi’s EC4P Platform for Shop Floor Virtualization Learn More: Discover more from VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Blog Related Articles VCF Breakroom Chats Episode 82 – Beyond DevOps: What is Platform Engineering? Building an AI Ready Factory: How Software Defined Production Is Transforming Manufacturing The CFO’s Case for On-Premises DBaaS: Repatriation and Cost Control Manufacturing automation is at an inflection point. AI is rapidly moving from experimentation to expectation, yet many factories still operate on hardware centric architectures designed for a different era. The result is a growing mismatch: AI ambitions are advancing faster than production infrastructure can support, creating new operational and competitive challenges. As AI use cases move closer to production workloads, this gap is becoming harder for manufacturing leaders to ignore. At the same time, manufacturing environments must continue to meet uncompromising requirements for reliability, safety, and performance. Downtime is not an option. Determinism still matters. And operational complexity continues to increase. To address these challenges, Audi , a German automotive manufacturer and wholly owned subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group, has rethought the foundation of production IT (Information Technology) and OT (Operational Technology) at scale across its production environments. Rather than relying on thousands of distributed devices and fixed function systems, Audi has adopted a software first approach to industrial automation, bringing the speed, flexibility, and operating model of IT into production environments without requiring disruptive, line by line rebuilds for every new capability. The result is Edge Cloud for Production (EC4P), which Audi is operating at scale across its production environments. EC4P combines established automation technology with the flexibility and computing model of an on premises edge cloud.