Digital Transformation and Digitization

Digitization of development and production operations in a high-tech automotive company

The digitization of the development and production of high-tech products represents one of the greatest sources of potential for value creation of our time. For thyssenkrupp Steering, the transformation into a data-driven industrial enterprise is a core element of its corporate strategy, in the interests of which data points from all areas of the company's business activities – market research, basic development, customer project management, production, supply chain, finance, and many more – are linked together.

Under this approach, the stringent demands on safety-critical products and the high performance standards required in the automotive industry are leading to extremely large volumes of product and process-related data, which in turn create virtually unlimited potential for data science, robot process automation and artificial intelligence. Specific starting points in this context include, for example, the use of artificial intelligence for detecting anomalies in production or the automated determination of the carbon footprint of supply chains with real-time data, for which reason digitization skills are fostered and called for in all disciplines and at all levels.

Thanks to my teammates' helpfulness and extensive know-how, I was able to learn an incredible amount of new things in the course of my internship. I was also given the opportunity to delve into a wide variety of topics and directly gain relevant practical knowledge through various projects.
Fabian, intern in the central digitalization team at thyssenkrupp Steering

thyssenkrupp Steering's digital vision

Before developing strategies and implementing measures, the organization should first have a concrete, common concept of the envisaged digitized company. The digitization and transformation activities at thyssenkrupp Steering are consistently geared to the following digital visions.

The employees of thyssenkrupp Steering are to be supported in their work by the best possible software and hardware solutions. A software-supported business process should be intuitive, efficient and largely automated in its execution. Working in interdisciplinary and spatially separated teams should feel as if there are no boundaries between the respective specialist disciplines and as if all participants are together in the same place.

More valuable data and more comprehensively networked systems make modern companies increasingly inviting targets for cyber attacks. Systems are also becoming more complex and thus potentially more susceptible to malfunctions.

The IT systems at thyssenkrupp Steering are to be designed and developed so as to be inherently secure, to which end their functionalities are to be systematically encapsulated and data streams actively controlled. Monitoring solutions are to make unexpected system behavior transparent and detect it autonomously.

Data-driven value creation requires the presence and availability of valuable data and intelligent services that provide or process those data. At thyssenkrupp Steering, all data and functionalities of relevance to employees' tasks are to be made readily identifiable and accessible in a controlled manner.

The employees of thyssenkrupp Steering should be able to create and refine their data-based solutions autonomously, to which end they have basic to advanced skills in software development and data analysis, which they can put to use in a short time thanks to an easily accessible infrastructure.

Any and all relevant information that can be used to virtually map thyssenkrupp Steering products and processes is to be collected and stored, including references and relationships to other data objects. In this way, a networked digital twin of the company is created which increasingly taps into digitization potential.

Artificial intelligence is to play a key role at thyssenkrupp Steering in its development and production operations - even beyond today's use in data analysis methods. The company's engineers are to be enabled to focus their attentions on coming up with new designs, optimizing products and searching out better manufacturing solutions. In the future, AI is to take over the tedious initial 80 percent of the work these tasks entail, so that human beings can fully focus on the intellectually demanding remaining 20 percent.

The work at thyssenkrupp Steering smoothened out my transition from the theoretical side of my studies to software development practice. In the young and communicative team, I was able to benefit greatly from the experienced developers and at the same time had a lot of freedom to try new things.
Sascha, Student trainee in the central digitization team at thyssenkrupp Steering

Specific examples of digitization and digital transformation at thyssenkrupp Steering

thyssenkrupp Steering has already taken a number of specific steps toward realizing its digital visions. The company's digital community has in particular an increasingly mature infrastructure at its disposal, enabling its members to focus fully on creating new, value-adding solutions. The following text contains some examples of how digitization and the digital transformation are being handled at thyssenkrupp Steering:

Valuable data is the gold of the 21st century. The data relating to enterprise resource planning (financial data, product data, logistics data, etc.) are of particular importance for the management and optimization of the company.

At thyssenkrupp Steering, the value of a great deal of this mission-critical data is being increased in a large-scale project (daproh@Steering) in that their definitions and development processes are reviewed, standardized and optimized. At the same time, the data are being made more easily and more efficiently accessible.

Ensuring thyssenkrupp Steering's success necessitates controlling and monitoring hundreds of thousands of tasks and orders on thousands of machines, and making their data accessible to other business processes. In the Manufacturing Operations Management project, the consumable volume and quality of shop floor data are being taken to a new level: live production metrics, complete traceability of thousands of end products at the touch of a button, or worldwide access to billions of measured values are enabled by a manufacturing execution system as well as modern analytics technologies.

The vision of modern automotive engineering lies in model-based systems, in which all data from a product's life cycle, from requirements engineering to system architecture, the bill of materials and product testing right through to field data are networked with each other. It is, for example, always immediately evident which requirements are behind a specified measured value in a test.

To achieve this objective, thyssenkrupp Steering is introducing a system life cycle system landscape that will set new standards for the systemization and networking of its engineering data. This is fundamental to future AI applications for the automated generation of product designs.

thyssenkrupp Steering is investing in the further development of possible applications for the latest AI technologies in product development and production data analysis. One of these applications, that is being continuously refined and was implemented for the company's production data, involves the automated detection and classification of anomalies.

New technologies like, for example, new programming languages or development frameworks, can now be quickly learned and integrated. This can help meet the different needs of a large developer community, especially in a citizen developer environment. With this in mind, the digitization team at thyssenkrupp Steering is continuously trying out new technologies, transparently integrating them into its tech stack and encouraging its developers to contribute their ideas and know-how.

thyssenkrupp Steering takes a business capability-driven software development approach.

For this purpose, the company has developed a comprehensive toolchain in which the steps of requirement definition, enterprise architecture development, business process modeling, agile project management, coding, deployment and documentation are integrated with each other. The technologies used in this context are state-of-the-art software tools.

A key to digital transformation is that all necessary roles in the organization are identified, clearly defined and assigned to motivated and competent employees.

Particular distinction is made between the following tasks:

Enterprise architecture design
Solution design
Software development & operations (DevOps)
IT architecture
IT infrastructure

Where applications solely developed for a particular department or plant are concerned, too, care is taken to ensure that these tasks are appropriately assigned and that the team functions well as a whole.

If you would like to find out if joining one such team appeals to you, please contact us via our Human Resources colleagues who specialize in digital profiles.

As a newbie, the journey from the first lesson to the first app was not always easy. I am extremely proud that I managed it and even got to enjoy coding in the end. Many thanks to the team who made sure that each and every step was challenging but still manageable for me.
Anzhela, Long-time employee and new digital citizen in Operations Controlling at thyssenkrupp Steering