IT democratization: VW AG rolls out Power Platform throughout the Group to structure data, increase process speed, and cut costs

The challenge: Countless stand-alone IT solutions

At Volkswagen AG, ILA is responsible for the key areas of risk management, legal affairs, intellectual property, data protection, compliance, and strategy. The team looks after employees representing ten Group brands as well as 1,200 companies in 97 countries. Over time, the Group has accumulated a multitude of IT tools and applications—many are stand-alone solutions, and some are sourced from external service providers and come with high operating costs. “Every part of the organization was using its own solution,” says Dr. Paul Hünecke, Head of Strategy & Principles at Volkswagen AG. “Viewed in terms of the Group as a whole, at a certain point this really eats into productivity and budgets.”

In some instances, there were no standardized or automated processes at all. Take Group-wide information inquiries: the controlling teams alone were generating countless emails and maintaining up to 600 different Excel lists, all of which had to be painstakingly evaluated. Now and again, ILA would provide custom answers to compliance inquiries even though the standard responses would have applied across brands. And dealing with Group-wide knowledge management was also tying up ILA’s capacity. In short, there was a dire need to optimize the standard use cases of tracking and reporting, information provision, and consultation.

Together with Group IT, Hünecke and his team set out to find a uniform solution that works for all brands and corporate divisions, a standard that would also satisfy VW AG’s governance and compliance regulations. The idea for the ILA Platform was born. The job of harmonizing IT throughout the Group and ensuring more consistency, efficiency, and speed went to Microsoft Power Platform. Going forward, the low-code approach would mean that the required apps could be developed not only by the IT team but also by savvy employees in other departments. “But how do you go about convincing decision-makers in an organization with a workforce of more than 600,000? We’re talking about managers who have invested a lot of money in their own solutions and trained their people on how to use them,” says Liam Scott Hurst, IT Portfolio Manager & Product Owner ILA Platform at Volkswagen AG. The answer was to talk to these people face to face. After several rounds of negotiations within the Group involving various bodies and committees, Hünecke and Hurst set off on their global grand tour: “We demonstrated why, after PowerPoint or Excel, Power Platform is the logical next-generation tool.” They successfully argued their case, secured Group-wide approval, and thus paved the way for the ILA Platform.

The solution: Harmonization of IT platforms and massive cost savings

From the word go, the ILA team was thinking about what would benefit the entire Group and not just its own division. “I remember us adopting a bit of a Robin Hood mindset,” Hurst says. “Compared with production or purchasing, we’re really quite small—just 3,000 people. But we were determined that our little band should provide a solution that would benefit everyone.” 

“Many of our colleagues are keen to get involved and become part of the development team. It won’t be long before they’ll be able to design apps for their own special requirements,” Hünecke says. Mareike Alpers, Product Manager Power Platform, adds: “The ILA Platform signaled the start of implementing Power Platform throughout the company. That in turn brings us a step closer to our goal of establishing overarching Group IT—or to put it another way, the democratization of our IT.”

What’s really proving persuasive are the experiences employees are having with the ILA Platform. One of the first use cases was consultation. “Am I allowed to accept an invitation to dinner? How much am I allowed to spend on a Christmas gift for a business partner? There are hundreds of compliance questions like these,” Hünecke says. And the answers are always largely the same—regardless of the brand or company. Today, inquiries of this kind from anywhere in the Group are submitted to a single app. The modular system of Power Platform makes it possible to have an easy-to-use app that offers standard answers across brands. Each employee can access only the data that falls within their scope of responsibility. Establishing a clean structure for compliance inquiries also makes it easier to run Group-wide evaluations, which in turn helps identify problem areas early on.

Power Platform also standardizes VW AG’s tracking and reporting: responses are fed into a single database instead of being spread across hundreds of Excel spreadsheets. 

Rather than having twelve technology providers for twelve processes, VW AG’s ILA division now has just one focus partner: Microsoft. “In collaboration with the Power Customer Advisory Team, we got the ball rolling on one of the top Power Platform use cases: every location in no fewer than 97 countries has the opportunity to use the ILA Platform,” Hurst says with great satisfaction. He adds that his team benefited greatly from the experiences of Power CAT with rollouts at other large enterprises. “We implemented the IT solution throughout the Group in just twelve months,” Hünecke says. “Not only has Power Platform made us faster, more efficient, and brought us closer to our customers, it will help us cut our development and operating costs considerably by 2030.”

By introducing Power Platform, the comparatively small Integrity & Legal Affairs division has paved the way for further applications within the VW Group. The same foundation could take risk management to a whole new level in terms of assessing and classifying financial, economic, ecological, and territorial risks. “Through our ILA Platform, we’ve established a uniform data corpus across all brands and divisions that can be expanded as needed,” Hurst says. The door is also open to the integration of an AI that would assist Volkswagen AG employees in performing their day-to-day tasks.