German car manufacturer, BMW, has selected Beckhoff Automation as the global standard supplier for Industrial PC (IPC) technology.
The agreement, announced on November 14, will tie the two companies together until 2030, and Beckhoff will supply BMW facilities worldwide, across sites including Germany, Brazil, China, India, South Africa, the UK, the US, and Mexico.
The terms of the agreement stipulate that all products from Beckhoff’s IPC portfolio will be used in new automotive manufacturing facilities as well as retrofits. Services offered include machine connectivity, access control, data acquisition, visualisation, among other tasks.
Beckhoff will bundle the product development itself, across IPC motherboards, and basic input/output systems (BIOS). Utilising Beckhoff systems will allow BMW to use the most current Intel Core i processors.
Beckhoff will work with BMW to customise their products to retrofit into existing BMW plants.
Beckhoff has become known for its IPC systems since its first control system delivered in 1986. Beckhoff IPCs perform tasks such as machine, process, and logistics control systems, networking of system components, and image processing.
Systems will be assembled at Beckhoff’s headquarters in Verl, with global customer support.