Data Services

Data Services

Data is a crucial driver for process efficiency and decision making. The breadth of data applications in traditional companies is much broader than one might think. You might have heard about exciting pilot projects in big data and artificial intelligence.

But don’t forget about the masses of employees dealing with spreadsheets and basic calculations daily. There is considerable potential to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of these activities.
 
The Data Services business center of Continental Engineering Services bundles the learnings of Continental on how to establish a data culture into an innovative service offering.

Our Value Proposition

We believe that value-adding data usage can be increased in all parts of organizations. That’s why we focus our efforts around the core idea of establishing a data culture. Increasing data literacy amongst the employee base is a unique offering of CES Data Services. We consult, train, and coach clients on their way to replicate our award-winning digital transformation story of upskilling business users.
 
Conducting data projects yields fast and impactful results. Our project experience is broad and ranges from automation of reporting to domain-specific process control and data science applications utilizing artificial intelligence. Some of the projects conducted for Continental are of a generic nature. They also comprise a large amount of domain and process best practice know-how. For this reason, we offer these as replicable data solutions as project blueprints.

Data Literacy​

So many colleagues work with data in one way or another. However, the tool of choice of most business users is still Microsoft Excel. Spreadsheets are great for quick and easy tasks. But they cannot fill the gap between business needs (e.g. in reporting or process control) and the capabilities of standard IT systems.
We found a way to train business users, without prior IT or programming background, in data skills. Utilizing the open source KNIME Analytics Platform and Microsoft’s PowerBI for interactive dashboards, we empower a huge and diverse user group from various functions.
 
Thousands of trained users benefit from automating work previously done in Excel, finding new answers in data, and basing decision making on facts.
In 2017, the Continental-internal initiative won the renowned Digital Leader Award in the category of Empower People. Seeing the benefits of a multi-thousand business user community and the emerging data culture, we offer the path to this success as a service package comprised of consulting, training, coaching, and pilot projects. While ‘data literacy’ is amongst the top topics on every hype cycle, only CES provides a proven and actionable service offering that scales well for business users.

Data Projects & Solutions

Potential for improvements based on data exist in many functions of manufacturing companies. The starting point is always a business challenge. For example, this might be an inefficient manual process in spreadsheet technology. Or it is a production process that is not 100% understood in its outcomes and shall be optimized based on the data it records. It is always advisable to have a clear objective, maybe even a hypothesis to test, and not to naively search for the gold nugget of information in vast amounts of data. Another surprising learning is that often the automation of data processes yields not only efficiency but also new insights.
For example, a logistics team could automatically analyze all material numbers instead of a 10-minute manual Excel analysis per case. That way, tight spots in the supply chain could be identified, without needing artificial intelligence methods at all.
Data projects are usually engineered from scratch. Depending on the business objective, a one-time analysis could already be the desired result. For example, identifying process drivers causing too high scrap rates in a production process. Often, also a prototype as a working piece of software in a well-defined setup and for a small target group is a project result. In cases that require sustainable repeatability or a bigger target audience shall use the resulting tools, we speak of data solutions.

Replicable Data Solutions from Project Blueprints

Some of our most impactful data projects include a large portion of domain knowledge and process best practice. We learned from the replication within Continental, that the previous projects are blueprints that only require a reasonable amount of adjustment when transferred to other units.
 
Being recognized as a benchmark company in areas such as inventories for automotive suppliers, our offer to implement such blueprints externally combines data methods with process know-how.

For example, Continental’s benchmark value of 26 days inventory outstanding (DIO) in the fiscal year 2018 was also supported by data analytics projects targeting stock reduction. One of these project blueprints simulates an ideal stock level on material number level. The resulting KPIs can be used as an internal benchmark enriched with an actionable list of materials of the highest reduction potential.

A second example is the financial forecasting and budgeting process of a plant. The integration of standard reports from customer demand over bill of materials to vendor data and stock significantly increases this process's efficiency. Taking days of manual effort previously, it calculates in minutes at the higher quality & precision level. Given the similarity of controlling logic across manufacturing plants, this project blueprint as well has proven to be transferable at reasonable efforts.

Training offers

Packages Participants Details
Train the experts
  • 25-30
  • Train experts from different departments
  • Basic and advanced data wrangling for complex data analytics tasks
  • Project coaching
Digital culture (small) Digital culture (medium) Digital culture (large)
  • 200+
  • 1000+
  • 5000+
  • Mass training to directly impact day to day task completion
  • Basic data wrangling training to enable employees to automate mundane jobs and to perform data analytics accurately
  • Demo useful patterns for easy application
Customized training
  • By request
  • Customized training for unique business needs

Why Data Services from CES?

Since 2006, Continental Engineering Services offers comprehensive know-how, creativity, and access to the entire technology pool of Continental AG. The Data Services unit within CES follows the same philosophy. Having guided Continental towards a data culture, we offer our unique and award-winning digital transformation story of establishing a data culture externally.
 
The success factor is the tailoring of training material and project examples to typical challenges in the manufacturing industry or related domains.
 
What also differentiates us is our vast experience in the manufacturing industry. Our project examples comprise all value chain elements, e.g. R&D, production, supply chain management, sales, controlling, and human relations.
One of CES’ missions is to bring Continental technologies to customers across diverse industries. This is a driving force of the Data Services team. We don’t have to start from scratch in our data projects, but customers can benefit from replication of data solutions based on project plans in areas where Continental is a recognized benchmark (e.g. automotive supplier inventories).

Digital Services Platform

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Cooperation Portal

Continental Cooperation Portal is an online platform and automates the process with all software suppliers. This results in only error-free applications being transferred to the development system.

IT & Data Solutions

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Upama Michel

Senior Manager Data Services
 

Email: upama.michel@conti-engineering.com

 

Upama Michel
Email: upama.michel@conti-engineering.com