From Continuity to High Availability in the Automotive Industry

The automotive industry is one of the most consolidated sectors on the European continent, both in terms of business volume and innovation in its processes: being one of the industries that contributes the most to the continent’s GDP, its exports far exceed its imports and it is the largest private investor in Europe in research and development (R&D).

However, the future development of an industry depends on its ability to achieve new levels of efficiency. This is highlighted in the PwC report “Hot Topics in the Automotive Industry in Spain 2013”, which warns of the risk to the industry of continuing to operate as “a large workshop”: “it will be difficult for the sector to occupy a prominent position internationally or for Spanish plants to continue to obtain relevant projects if there is no leap in innovation… Everything indicates that the current model can maintain the workload forecast for the coming years, but it is worth asking whether it is sustainable in the medium and long term”.

Despite being one of the sectors that most intensively applies technology, among the issues that continue to affect the industry is the impact that downtimes have on its productivity.

On average, according to estimates by the Meta Group consultancy, one hour of inactivity costs €541,616. Thus, the difference between 99.9% continuity versus 99.999%, although it may seem insignificant, implies going from losses of €4,744,556 per year to only €45,134 in the same period. In light of these figures, High Availability is more than an improvement; it is now a real necessity for the sector.

Although in general terms an always-on architecture has a fairly standard design, the premise is that each plant has a particular configuration need. Fault-tolerant servers, virtual machines, Client/Server architectures oriented to remote desktop services, thin clients, virtualization for industries already in the cloud environment or change management technology are solutions available to the industry that should be valued and implemented gradually but continuously.

The high need for maintenance of production systems, the continuous manufacturing dynamics given the strong market demand, the importance of protecting automotive plants given their costly asset configuration, as well as the complexity in the use and optimization of the various energy sources present in the processes – electricity, gas, steam, air, cold… – make high availability the most appropriate response to the challenges of the automotive sector today. According to the ARC Advisory Group consultancy, it is estimated that the industry worldwide loses 5% of its annual production, 15 billion euros, as a result of unexpected stoppages and failures in the quality of production, dealing with foreseeable situations and avoidable in 80% of cases.