BMW standardizing on Beckhoff until 2030

Announcement: https://www.beckhoff.com/english.asp?press/news0919.htm

Beckhoff earned a significant victory in their rise to challenge The Big Three after BMW announced it chose Beckhoff as their primary controls provider to supply its production facilities world wide until 2030.

BMW performed approximately 3 years of intensive testing on Siemens, Rockwell, Beckhoff, and B&R platforms and found Beckhoff’s IPC (industrial PC) platform to be the best suited for their future manufacturing needs. The majority of BMW’s production facilities currently utilize Siemens as their controls platform.

BMW will utilize Beckhoff’s IPC technology for both new systems and retrofits.  BMW will most likely continue to utilize Siemens circuit protection components as Beckhoff does not offer these components directly.

Beckhoff’s platform will be used for data exchanges among machines, managing access control,  data acquisition, visualization, and other PC-based tasks.

BMW’s cost of re-training their support staff and performing change management on their production lines is a substantial investment in both time and money. This exemplifies just how impressed BMW is with the performance, cost, and flexibility of Beckhoff’s  IPC-centric controls platform.  BMW is willing to risk a lot in order to ensure their production facilities are capable of utilizing new innovations in machine learning, vision, data acquisition, and simulation which Beckhoff focuses on.