Big Data Strategy Dialog in Germany Connects Corporate Decision Makers With Suppliers

Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, February 17, 2016 (Newswire.com) - ​„This dialog focuses on use cases and business models already possible today“, explains Sven Hardt, CEO of Swiss-based organizer Cintelligence Ltd.

Claus Moldenhauer, CIO and Board Member of health insurance DAK, presents a Big Data use case in the company’s care management. Insurances as purely data-driven companies benefit strongly from Big Data. DAK uses Big Data in steering financial supplies to beneficiaries. Moldenhauer explains the modes of action, the strategy development and the project management. He also talks about mistakes and gives an outlook.

Four speakers represent process industries. These industries can optimize their typical challenges in fields like processes, supply chains, security or compliance with the help of Big Data. In his presentation „Big Data for Smart Operations“ Dr. Carl-Helmut Coulon, Head of Future Manufacturing Concepts at Invite GmbH, shares some insights of what he believes will be the future of process manufacturing. The former Bayer manager joined Invite in 2015. Invite was founded by Bayer and the University of Dortmund as a think tank for process manufacturing.

Dr. Peter Stelter, Vice President Strategy and Technology Management at KHS, presents three use cases in the field of beverage filling. KHS is one of the leading machine builders in this sector. Big Data optimizes the tracking and tracing in aseptic filling, the condition-based maintenance and the pattern recognition.

Dr. Alain Bernard, Head of Technical Operation Business Excellence at UCB, reports how the Brussels-based corporation makes knowledge management faster and more successful. Dr. Bernard takes a close look at project, change and R&D management. A research-driven global pharmaceutical company  generates a huge amount of new knowledge every day, next to the giant amount of existing knowledge. The fast and intelligent analysis and distribution of this knowledge increases the company’s innovative strength as well as the curing prospects of patients.

Data driven services in the process industry is the daily business of Andreas Weber, Vice President Business Development and Head of Technical Services at Evonik Technology & Infrastructure GmbH. Weber assumes that digitalization changes values as well as value chains in process industry and that data are the main resources of Industry 4.0. They enable new customer-centric business models. One example is the concept of predictive maintenance that potentially disrupts old business models. Will the customer purchase a plant or just service?

Weidmueller is a leading manufacturer of electrical connection technology. They use Big Data in energy and maintenance processes to cut internal cost, but also to develop new products and services for their customers.  Dr. Jan Stefan Michels, Head of standards and technology development at Weidmueller Interface GmbH & Co. KG, presents this hand-on development approach.

 Logistics giant Deutsche Bahn is represented by two speakers from IT and HR. Dr. Markus Albert, IT Strategist at Deutsche Bahn Mobility Logistics AG, heads the digitalization strategy of Deutsche Bahn. He exemplifies the role of Big Data in this strategy as well as the technical and organizational implementation of Big Data in the enterprise.

Ivana Dedus, Head of Analysis, Reports and HR Steering at Deutsche Bahn AG, is testing Big Data in different fields of HR management, e.g. labor turnover steering or HR marketing. In a company employing 300,000 people the real-time analysis  of huge amounts of HR related data creates new correlations formerly not visible. These Big Data insights enable new and improved management approaches.

Three presentations at Big Data Strategy Dialog focus on marketing, a discipline put upside down by Big Data. Media corporations develop new Big-Data-driven business models. Catherin Anne Hiller, Director Research & Consulting at Bauer Media Group, shares how one of Germany’s major media companies implements Big Data technology for new products and services. She takes a closer look at analysis and interpretation, because Big Data analysis typically creates answers to questions nobody asked. Nevertheless these answers are subject to new business. The surprising correlations are the most exciting ones.

Classical market research is strongly affected by Big Data. Why doing interviews when the relevant information is accessible for automated analysis on the web? Established market research companies must adapt quickly to these new market surroundings. Two of them present their new Big-Data-based business models at the Big Data Strategy Dialog.

Robert Wucher, Head of Technology and Dr. Ralph Wirth, Head of Data Lab, both at German market research leader GfK present new analytic models based on Big Data. They share successful uses cases in the business units of online media planning and product launches as well as Big Data projects still in the development stage. The latter are in the fields of forecasting, hypothesis testing and social media.

Long-established market researcher Psyma group founded the startup company  Data2Face together with software maker epoq to develop a new Big-Data-driven business. The Data2Face software is able to classify and segment all users of a website by analyzing clickstream data with the help of artificial intelligence in real time. Semantic analysis identifies similar behaviors. The internet as data source plus machines as evaluators replace human beings in market research companies. Psyma contributes competencies in data interpretation to the joint venture. This is a good example for a radical digital transformation in an established industry to secure market positions in the future.

Big Data can also pimp a classical CRM into a truly intelligent semi-automated sales engine by integrating social media and other web information intelligently and in real-time. Maria-Amparo Sanmateu, Senior Project Manager at Deutsche Telekom think tank T-Labs points out how users gain competitive advantages by integrating brand new approaches in their sales process.

Reinhard Breyer, CIO at Mercedes tuner AMG, presents a Big Data QM use case based on SAP HANA. The processing and visualization of tens of thousands data points within seconds in engine testing accelerates the testing process, cuts cost and improves product development, because the real-time analysis identifies weak points already in testing that otherwise would have been uncovered way later.

What is the Big Data technological status quo and where are we heading  to? For Dr. Franz-Josef Pfreundt, Head of High Performance Computing (HPC) at Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics, current infrastructures as Splunk or Hadoop are quickly over-challenged with highly complex predictions. For him current technological leaps in machine learning and deep learning are the base for new Big Data infrastructure built around HPC and artificial intelligence.

Big Data also offers new opportunities for R&D. Spinner GmbH is a manufacturer of high frequency technology. Because the classical development approach led to a deadlock in the case of a new product idea Spinner developers decided to use a Big-Data-based simulation. Dr. Christoph Neumaier, Innovation Manager at Spinner, is still surprised that the simulation produced new and good solutions they never had in mind before. Falling HPC cost made highly complex simulations feasible that just some years before have been too expensive for the medium sized business.

For Hellmann Worldwide Logistics Big Data implementation has been a strategic corporate project. Dr. Saskia Untiet-Kepp, Manager Global Information Systems reports how they started to identify use cases and created information and data catalogs. IT systems needed to be expanded. New jobs and roles have been created in the organization. One lesson: Big Data is not only about technology but also about organizational and cultural change.                                                                            

Peter Wiener, Vice President Remote Services at Siemens Healthcare, presents a corporate innovation project. It’s about a new data center that has been especially designed for Big Data.

All these presentations are very different but they have one thing in common: Big Data is always disruptive. The intelligent real-time analysis of giant amounts of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data with new technologies is not BI in a new guise. Big Data is the base for new business models, new products and new processes. Companies have to master this challenge technologically and culturally to stay competitive.

The German Big Data Strategy Dialog  at 12th/13th April in Bonn is a rare opportunity for decision makers to receive valuable and useful ideas and suggestions on the way to a fully digitalized enterprise.