KNIME Customer Success Story

Sparking data literacy
with KNIME and making
better decisions.

Empowering business users worldwideCompany

Continental is committed to increasing the data literacy of the entire organization by empowering

Continental develops pioneering

users in business functions (with no IT or programming background) to work more efficiently andtechnologies and services for

effectively with data and, ultimately, discover new insights with that data.
Microsoft Excel used to be the go-to tool for business users handling data at Continental. Today, it isperfectly enriched by KNIME Analytics Platform for standard workflows, bigger data volumes, or datasustainable and connected mobilityof people and their goods. Founded in
1871, the technology company offers
safe, efficient, intelligent, and affordable
solutions for vehicles, machines,

discovery. For example, repetitive tasks, such as certain forecasting processes, are now automatedtraffic and transportation. In 2018,in KNIME Analytics Platform. Until recently, this was either done via complex spreadsheets or Visual

Continental generated sales of €44.4

Basic for Applications Macros (VBA, the programming language built into Excel). However, Continental
began experiencing maintainability and performance issues for medium-sized data volumes.

billion. Continental has approximately
2,000 users of the open source KNIME
Analytics Platform worldwide and alsouses KNIME Server for collaboration

There are thousands of Excel users at Continental, all working in diverse business functions:amongst power users.

controlling, tax, HR, R&D, production planning, etc. The need to give these users a tool which canautomate mundane data processing and reporting tasks resulted in a company-wide initiative to roll
Solution highlights

out KNIME Analytics Platform.

A global, low barrier, roll-out
The roll-out of KNIME at Continental started out as a pilot project in Chassis & Safety (C&S), a €9.6bnsales division of the corporation, and was led by Dr. Arne Beckhaus (Head of Big Data and Digital

80%

time savings in our pilot projects

Transformation C&S). The very first use case emerged in the Brake System R&D Department, whereKNIME was used to generate Kanban boards based on data exported from the issue tracking system.
AutomotiveAn agile setup of starting small and expanding quickly had a positive response. It was quickly clear

Manufacturing

Data Literacy

just how much business users loved using KNIME and how much data processing power was gained.
The roll-out was made easier by positive word of mouth and a high, bottom-up demand for trainings
on how to use KNIME.
Many processes across the entire organization have now achieved higher levels of automation. For
example, production planning, reporting (controlling, logistics, etc.), various project managementtasks such as Kanban boards and deadline tracking, supply chain warnings, and so on. Data
integration and data wrangling are now mostly done by business users in KNIME, and, in many cases,
this step alone yields the promised data insight or process automation. Sometimes KNIME is used for
an intermediate data preparation step before the data can be exported to visualization tools such as
PowerBI, Tableau, and MicroStrategy. Continental also uses Amazon Web Services for long-runningworkflows (or workflows which are RAM or CPU hungry).

KNIME AG · Technoparkstrasse 1 · 8005 Zurich, Switzerland · info@knime.com · www.knime.com©2020 KNIME AG. All rights reserved. The KNIME® trademark and logo and OPEN FOR INNOVATION® trademark are used by KNIME AG under license from KNIME GmbH, and are registered in theUnited States. KNIME® is also registered in Germany.

KNIME Customer Success Story“Since rolling out KNIME at Continental, we’re making better decisions, everywhere.
We’re also able to back these decisions on stronger data, faster. We’re gaining moreinsights from data, and freeing human capacity from mundane data processing andreporting tasks.”
Dr. Arne Beckhaus - Head of Big Data and Digital Transformation C&S at Continental

Better decisions, more insights, huge resource savings
And there’s a lot more potential for using KNIME throughout the organization. “One indicator for thehigh adoption of KNIME is the rising demand for in-house trainings” Arne continues. “It is great to seethat we can serve this huge bottom up momentum with a very small central team”. The next steps
will entail creating more user-specific training content for users in different departments, enablinga more institutionalized roll-out, and realizing and standardizing knowledge sharing across teams
and departments. Due to high interest by external parties who want to learn from Continental’s datatransformation journey, the decision was even made to offer data services to external clients using
KNIME. Continental Engineering Services is now an official KNIME Partner and able to offer theseservices.

Significant time savings of over80

Lead time eduction fromRun an entire plant budgeting

Serial number traceability to2 days toprocess at a

R&D, plant, and quality users as

30%

in pilot projects.

minof month-end controlling tasks .

Why KNIME?

10a self-service tool - providing
answers in minutes rather thanfold

an entire day.

precision level.

KNIME is easy to maintain long term and can be enhanced with custom
extensions, which are built and developed by Continental. Examples include

KNIME was chosen primarily for its business user friendliness but also due

extensions to enable custom formatting in Excel reports, or to parse thirdto speed, data volume, breadth of functionality, and state-of-the art data

party PDF documents with text position information for automaticallywrangling and data science features

analyzing contract information. From an IT perspective, KNIME iseasily installed on client PCs worldwide. Continental can pre-package a	“From a business perspective, the open source model was the only

customized installation and deliver it as a standalone software application -commercially feasible option to rapidly spread data analytics competence

making it easy for KNIME to be included in the official software distribution

throughout the organization”. Dr. Arne Beckhaus - Head of Big Data and Digitalprocess.

Transformation C&S at Continental

Lastly, rolling out KNIME to business departments has helped raise theA long tail of infrequent users would have made the license fees tooawareness of analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) at the management

expensive and a flat, company-wide license would have slowed everythinglevel. They now understand the advantage of finding answers to problems

down due to the initial investment. Typical commercial business models

by effective data wrangling and the necessity of good quality data forsimply would not have enabled such rapid dissemination. KNIME Server

applying data science algorithms in KNIME. The result? Increased data

is now also used on selected projects at Continental, enabling teams toliteracy across the organization, more efficient, automated processes, newcollaborate on KNIME workflows and share amongst colleagues.

insights from data without blind application of AI, and better decisions
everywhere.

KNIME AG · Technoparkstrasse 1 · 8005 Zurich, Switzerland · info@knime.com · www.knime.com©2020 KNIME AG. All rights reserved. The KNIME® trademark and logo and OPEN FOR INNOVATION® trademark are used by KNIME AG under license from KNIME GmbH, and are registered in theUnited States. KNIME® is also registered in Germany.