Com­pa­nies often lack con­crete data usage and imple­men­ta­tion ideas. A lack of resources or insuf­fi­cient trust are exam­ples of bar­ri­ers that pre­vent many SMEs from using exist­ing data as effi­cient­ly as pos­si­ble. Based on this, a poten­tial analy­sis was car­ried out in the com­pa­ny at the begin­ning, which was com­plete­ly free of charge for the par­tic­i­pat­ing com­pa­nies due to the fund­ing of the project as part of the Simul+ ini­tia­tive. The project team ana­lyzed the entire busi­ness process chain for pos­si­ble start­ing points for improve­ment measures.

Each poten­tial analy­sis began with a quick check. The aim was to famil­iar­ize them­selves effi­cient­ly with the com­pa­ny’s exist­ing process­es and pro­ce­dures. The quick check was car­ried out in inter­views along the order flow with pre-defined employ­ees. In addi­tion to the inter­views, we also record­ed the exist­ing IT and data basis. This served as the basis for our joint work. This was fol­lowed by the devel­op­ment of a net­work of key fig­ures, which pro­vid­ed indi­ca­tors for the tar­get­ed process improve­ments. Anoth­er com­po­nent of the quick check was the imple­men­ta­tion of an ini­tial analy­sis of the com­pa­ny data. Devel­oped dash­boards were used for data visu­al­iza­tion and pro­vid­ed infor­ma­tion about the cur­rent uti­liza­tion of your machines, the avail­abil­i­ty of mate­ri­als, employ­ees and oth­er inter­est­ing aspects. The quick check was con­clud­ed with a pre­sen­ta­tion of the results: The process­es of the order through­put were doc­u­ment­ed, ini­tial poten­tial improve­ments were iden­ti­fied and sort­ed accord­ing to their priority.

The effort involved amount­ed to 1.5 work­ing days, with two con­sul­tants car­ry­ing out the data analy­sis in the com­pa­ny on the first day and the sec­ond day being used for a short­er eval­u­a­tion and pre­sen­ta­tion of the results. The results of the quick check were then used for a joint fine-tun­ing of the project objec­tives in the project plan. Togeth­er with you, we derived the first imme­di­ate mea­sures that you could imme­di­ate­ly apply in your com­pa­ny. In addi­tion to the Quick Wins, Long Term Wins were derived, which were worked on over a longer peri­od of time due to their com­plex­i­ty. Dur­ing the course of the project, com­pa­nies also approached our project team with a spe­cif­ic idea for improv­ing poten­tial and we then pro­vid­ed tar­get­ed support.

The com­ple­tion of the Simul⁺ real-life exper­i­ment, includ­ing all the data-based val­ue cre­ation poten­tial dis­cov­ered, ini­ti­at­ed the imme­di­ate imple­men­ta­tion of this in their com­pa­ny. Data­L­ab West­sax will con­tin­ue to exist both as a phys­i­cal lab­o­ra­to­ry in Zwick­au and as a dig­i­tal lab­o­ra­to­ry after the end of the project.