Manufacturing as a Service

Flex partnered with T-Systems to migrate ECU data exchange to Catena-X, enabling secure, multiregional, real-time validation across global production sites. Using T-Systems’ Connect & Integrate solution, Flex achieved end-to-end integration, API and Cofinity-X interface testing, and a fully validated production setup. This scalable dataspace foundation now supports future use cases including Product Carbon Footprint, Certificate Management, Battery Pass, and global traceability, while maintaining full data sovereignty.

Sovereign connectivity in dataspaces requires automating network access to ensure security, compliance, and operational scale. In the Data Intelligence Hub, we replace manual firewall updates with a declarative, Kubernetes-native model using Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs). Customers define their allowed IP ranges through a self-service portal, which generates an IpAccessPolicy object representing the desired state. A controller then reconciles this state with the underlying infrastructure, automatically updating Kubernetes Ingress configurations and preventing drift. This architecture ensures auditability, validates inputs before enforcement, and keeps network access aligned with the principles of data sovereignty across multi-tenant environments.

Flex leverages Catena-X to build a reusable, standards-based automotive data ecosystem. By starting small and scaling through economies of scope, Flex delivers multiregional data solutions for ECU management, certificate compliance, and supply-chain traceability, enabling sovereign data sharing, faster innovation, and cost-efficient reuse across multiple OEMs and use cases.