Beckhoff Supplies BMW with IPC Technology
Beckhoff Automation GmbH & Co. KG (Verl, Germany) will supply BMW Group (Munich, Germany) with Industrial PC (IPC) technology for use in car manufacturing through 2030. According to the terms of the recently signed agreement, Beckhoff will supply production facilities worldwide. This means that their IPC technology will become a global standard for BMW. The Industrial PCs and multi-touch Control Panels will be used – both in new automotive manufacturing facilities and for retrofits – for machine connectivity, access control, data acquisition, visualization and other PC-based tasks. All product categories from the wide Industrial PC portfolio offered by Beckhoff will be used: IP65-rated CP32xx Panel PCs, ultra-compact C6030 IPCs, C5240 19-inch slide-in IPCs and CP29xx multi-touch built-in Control Panels.
Standard Beckhoff products will be used that have been adapted to some extent to ensure optimum retrofitting in existing plants and to include customer-specific key extensions. Their comprehensive product portfolio offers BMW the ability to use the latest Intel® Core™ i processor series in a wide range of IPC form factors. On account of the rapid innovation cycles and interoperability within the portfolio, upcoming processor generations will be simple to integrate in the future as well.
The bundling of all product development steps from IPC motherboard and BIOS development to mechanical adaptations, enables optimal answers to customer-specific requirements. In combination with full control over the added-value chain based on in-house assembly and production in Verl, Germany, the company offers the ideal infrastructure for a long-term partnership. In addition, the globally available services provided by Beckhoff ensure optimum support of customers’ manufacturing facilities distributed all over the world.
