The new battery company PowerCo SE will set new standards in terms of sustainability and innovation in cell production, based on SAP
In our pre-event interview, Andreas Eckle, describes his exciting new role as CIO at PowerCo. He explains why standardization will not only cover equipment, buildings, and infrastructure but also products, processes, and IT. This way, factories will be created that can rapidly be converted for further product and production innovations.
With an investment of more than €20 billion, sales potential of €20 billion and up to 20,000 jobs planned, PowerCo aims to become a global battery champion. The first cell factory in Salzgitter will be the blueprint for PowerCo’s global battery offensive with a planned annual capacity of up to 40 GWh – enough for about 500.000 electric vehicles. Currently, PowerCo is building up three gigafactories in Europe and North America with a total volume of up to 200 GWh.
The megaproject in Salzgitter was kicked off in July 2022, and it’s not hard to imagine that busy activity is going on to prepare the start of cell production in 2025. At PowerCo, a single global SAP instance will serve as a central architecture for the global enterprise.
The standard imperative
“There is one big advantage in starting from scratch: there is no legacy”, CIO Andreas Eckle points out. “We chose SAP as our software partner at a very early stage. Processes are predefined by the SAP standard and can be quickly implemented.”
“For sticking to the Fit2Standard concept, people at PowerCo need a new mindset”, he explains. “As Salzgitter is supposed to be the blueprint for further cell plants in the future, every person at PowerCo has to commit to “standard thinking” from the very first moment. And standardized processes help our new users to quickly adopt and work with the software.”