Red Sofa Interview: VW’s Anu Goel on thinking regionally in FVL

At Finished Vehicle Logistics North America 2024, Goel gave Automotive Logistics the latest insights and learnings from his Virtual Task Force. 

“I think the status quo got disrupted and we had to adjust,” he said. ”We previously thought of our network as individual countries, but when you look at our ports, our rail systems, our trucking, everything, they are interrelated. So decisions that would be made in one country had knock-on effects elsewhere with our network.”

Read more: Volkswagen Group’s North America vehicle logistics approach saves cost and delivery time

He said the first thing he did was to look at things from a VW Group North America perspective, and then align on KPIs across the region. ”If you asked how many cars are on the ground in a specific country, some countries would include or not include port inventory, some would or would not include off site storage. So we needed to just get some basic KPIs down now, so we understand the magnitude of the problem,” Goel added. 

Thirdly, he said the froup started looking at systems transparency to ensure that data and information can be shared across subdivisions of the group.