VW IT City

The 55,000-square-meter IT City, which is geared toward agile working, has work islands for project teams, meeting points, networked conference rooms and retreats for concentrated work, and also provides 1,000 parking spaces. However, even the new building complex is not enough to bring all of Volkswagen’s IT specialists together under one roof in Wolfsburg.

Finding the way from the main plant to the IT City and within the IT City posed challenges for the international workforce and guests, and meant daily waiting and searching times that were a considerable stress factor in addition to time loss.

To optimize navigation in and around Volkswagen’s digital center, Favendo was contracted in December 2018 to deliver hardware and software to ensure seamless indoor & outdoor navigation via a mobile application. In a first step designed for two years, a main building was first equipped with the necessary hardware to enable convenient indoor navigation. The branded Favendo whitelabel app, which helps employees and guests easily navigate and find their way around the complex, positions itself indoors via around 500 BLE beacons and outdoors via GPS.

The app is available for download to Volkswagen employees and visitors. A proximity function provides users of the application with additional information on selected points of interest.

The resulting data is processed by the Commander Location Engine on Volkswagen servers as part of an on-premises solution. The solution complies with the data security guidelines of the Volkswagen Group. The app meets all CI requirements.

The requirements set by Volkswagen were met 100 percent: Travel times were significantly reduced. In total, the IT City project eliminated travel times of 40 minutes several times a day for Volkswagen’s computer experts.