Faurecia, Groupe Renault, Knauf Industries, Simoldes, and Coşkunöz, in association with IBM, have signed a partnership contract for the deployment of XCEED (eXtended Compliance End-to-End Distributed), a blockchain-based shared solution to trace the compliance of thousands of parts assembled in a vehicle in almost real time. (Earlier post.)
This move follows the successful testing of the XCEED solution at Renault’s Douai plant. XCEED will be deployed to partners’ plants around Bursa in Turkey, Douai in France, and Palencia in Spain. XCEED is now open to global OEMs and suppliers, no matter the size, throughout the supply chain.
XCEED improves responsiveness and efficiency at a time of ever-greater regulatory stringency. New market surveillance regulations came into force in September 2020, introducing enhanced regulatory controls for vehicles already on the market. The entire production chain thus must adjust its structure to respond to the regulatory authorities within shorter timeframes.
The goal for XCEED is to provide a compliance and conformity traceability platform for the entire ecosystem of the European automotive industry, for answering regulation and customer demand, and bolsters European industrial competitivity and technological sovereignty. XCEED is designed to be inclusive for all the automotive industry players worldwide, from multinational companies to SMEs, with access to a powerful, shared digital tool.
XCEED uses the blockchain to create a trusted network for sharing compliance information between parts/systems manufacturers, throughout the supply chain to end vehicle manufacturers. The XCEED platform will help ensure better and more efficient compliance management, while respecting each company’s confidentiality, intellectual property, and data ownership.
Having a unique but distributed platform across the automotive ecosystem is a very good way for the industry to answer to the growing requirements of regulation without multiplying complex data reconciliations. It will thereby benefit the European automotive industry by improving information exchange and increasing trust within and outside the ecosystem through automatic sharing, checks and alerts of data in near real time. The solution is the result of the initial action led by its founding partners and based on an open governance approach to welcome new participants. It is also realized in interaction with DG Connect in the European Commission.
Based on “Hyperledger Fabric”, an open-source blockchain protocol, XCEED has been developed in partnership with IBM. It intends to be deployed in a Hybrid Cloud architecture with multiple Cloud providers, among which IBM Cloud, to allow each member to run on the Cloud platform of their own choice.