IT Automation at BMW: From 60 Hours to 20 Minutes

IT/OT Convergence in Practice IT Automation at BMW: From 60 Hours to 20 Minutes

2026-10-29 Source: Red Hat | Translated by AI 2 min Reading Time

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To speed up vehicle development, the BMW Group has modernized its entire high-performance computing (HPC) environment. In doing so, the automaker replaced a 30-year-old legacy system with a modern automation layer—achieving enormous time savings.

The global automotive manufacturer reduces the time required for infrastructure configurations from 60 hours to 20 minutes—30,000 employees benefit from the increased operational efficiency.(Source: Red Hat) — The global automotive manufacturer reduces the time required for infrastructure configurations from 60 hours to 20 minutes—30,000 employees benefit from the increased operational efficiency.
(Source: Red Hat)

In industry, traditional automation engineering and IT infrastructure are increasingly converging. A major project at the BMW Group currently demonstrates just how substantial the efficiency gains from consistent IT automation can be: the automaker has migrated the management of its around 15,000 Linux and Windows servers to Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Platform.This HPC environment is the backbone of vehicle development and handles compute-intensive tasks such as 3D modeling and crash-test simulations. Until now, it was managed by a proprietary system developed in-house 30 years ago (“scVenus”), for which support has now expired.

Infrastructure as Code Brings Massive Time Savings

The switch to the standardized platform that treats infrastructure as code (infrastructure as code) delivered immediately measurable results in IT operations:

Drastically reduced runtimes: Complex infrastructure tasks that previously took up to 60 hours on thousands of nodes are now completed in 20 minutes thanks to optimized playbooks.
Less routine work: The effort required for recurring administrative processes fell by 75 percent.
Self-service: Via a central portal, the roughly 30,000 internal users can renew software licenses or submit support requests, which relieves the IT department. The premise was strict: the migration of the 15,000 servers was not allowed to affect ongoing vehicle development at any time.

“AI must not Directly Manage Production Systems”

For the future, BMW is now exploring the use of event-driven automation and AI coding assistants to automatically fix recurring IT issues. Johan Barnard, Team Lead Ansible Core at the BMW Group, makes it clear that the automation layer plays the role of the “gatekeeper”: “AI cannot be directly entrusted with managing production systems—this requires a trusted automation layer.” A principle that, in times of AI hype, is likely to be trend-setting especially for plant manufacturers and industrial automation (OT).

AI cannot be tasked directly with managing production systems—for that, a trustworthy automation layer is needed.

Johan Barnard, Team Lead Ansible Core at the BMW Group

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