Continental zooms ahead of competitors by preventing production bottlenecks

• Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
• Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration

• Automotive

• Discrete Manufacturing
• Product Research & Development

• Predictive Maintenance
• Manufacturing System Automation

• Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
• Data Science Services

Continental Tires, a major global tire manufacturer, was facing inefficiencies in its production landscape, which manufactures 10,000 different products. The company was using manual, spreadsheet-based allocation of products to production plants, which was extremely complex and time-consuming. The process was entirely dependent on the know-how and experience of the people driving it and used no form of computer-aided optimization. Since data could not be transferred between documents automatically, it was also easy to make mistakes. The company planned production budgets annually and at a fairly high level to lighten the burden this process placed on its planners. But since the company launches 1,000 new products every year, even this method was becoming unviable.

Continental Tires is a major global tire manufacturer, generating annual revenues of around EUR9.8 billion and employing around 47,500 people. Continental Tires is a division of Continental AG, a German firm that ranks among the top five automotive suppliers worldwide. The company produces more than 10,000 different types of tires to fit a huge range of vehicles, each of which has different requirements, purposes, and target markets. Since tire manufacturing is a machine- and capital-intensive process, smart utilization of that huge investment is critical.

Continental Tires decided to support and improve planning with an optimization solution called Future Allocation and Capacity Tracking (FACT), which is based on IBM® Decision Optimization Center software. The company joined forces with IBM Global Business Services® and IBM Software Group Lab Services to complete a smooth implementation of the new solution. FACT captures information related to manufacturing – including product specifications, machine capacities at individual plants, and staff planning through shift allocations – from back-end systems. The back-end systems include Forecasting, Data Warehouses, and ERP modules such as Production Planning, Materials Management, Quality Management, and other systems. Since data is pulled directly from source systems, the risk of errors from manual transfer has been significantly reduced. The solution then performs highly complex mathematical optimization calculations to help planners decide which plants should make which products to obtain the greatest possible demand fulfillment and cost-efficiency.

• The solution enables Continental Tires to test the feasibility of its manufacturing plans, predict when bottlenecks are likely to occur, and take corrective action.
• Freed from number crunching and fixing errors in spreadsheets, planners at Continental Tires have more time for value-add tasks.
• The number of what-if analyses – in which planners evaluate the likely impact of decisions on output, revenues and profits – has increased from 1 to 30 per planning cycle.

• Optimizes long-term production planning, considering up to ten million constraints across all products and plants.
• Saves up to 30% of planners’ time, allowing them to focus on value-add initiatives.