21
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January 2020
8 minutes

Machine Learning and AI – how they support your strategy work in a meaningful way

Inspiring exchange at the 8th Solyp 4.0 User Circle in Nuremberg

Through extended statistics and machine learning, important insights can be gained along the strategy process for corporate benefit. (Picture: Andrey Suslov/istock.com)

Current and important topics, inspiring discussions and also charity: In December we invited our Solyp users to Nuremberg for two days. For the eighth time, our customers came to exchange information with us about trends and developments in the technology industry, the Solyp platform, and developments in the field of analytics.

Relevant impulses on machine learning and artificial intelligence

Since the beginning of 2019, experts under the leadership of Ronald Herse and Florian Dreher have been working intensively on using our Solyp platform to analyze and evaluate existing data from the company using Advanced Analytics methods and to generate additional strategic insights. An important topic for companies in recent months.

Therefore, machine learning was the basis of our workshop. During the past year, Ronald Herse and Florian Dreher gained important insights along the strategy process for corporate benefit through extended statistics and machine learning – they shared the impulses they gained with our participants:

  1. Topic and technology scouting:
    Which technology topics achieve what significance when and which market participants are counting on them?
  2. Environment monitoring and trend radar:
    Which are the decisive factors in the business environment and should therefore be constantly monitored?
  3. Sales management:
    How strongly and with what time lag does the change in the environment affect the sales of our business units?
  4. Planning quality and reliability:
    Which of our 200+ strategic plans should be checked for plausibility and risk?
  5. Qualitative topic clustering:
    What are the relevant, cross-business unit findings from a large number of qualitatively formulated trends?

It is becoming increasingly relevant in the VUCA world (Volatility/Uncertainty/Complexity/Ambiguity) to think and pursue corporate strategy end-to-end. This is the only way for companies to remain capable of acting, to adapt processes more quickly and to make quicker decisions. "It is necessary to look for ways and build bridges to absorb speed without compromising quality," says Ronald Herse.

You can find further impulses in our detailed blog articles on Strategic Insights – Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

How do we manage to gain even more insights from existing data?

In order to capture machine learning, the workshop participants listed the following key issues:

  • Topic and technology scouting
  • Environmental monitoring & trend radar
  • Sales-related pre-control
  • Qualitative topic clustering and
  • Planning quality and security.

They designed how to improve their own planning quality and reliability and how to use automatic forecasts as a self-learning plausibility check.

The following questions are essential:

  1. What generates real user benefit?
    • Document and interpret the "why" of the deviation
    • Inclusion of external information
    • Simultaneous calculations
    • Objectification of the planning
  2. What are practical implementation hurdles and open issues?
    • No experience with the quality of machine-based planning
    • Acceptance
    • "Political guidelines" for planning or "add-ons"
  3. What should be considered in the implementation? What are the levers for implementation?
    • Pay attention to the explanation by human brains: enable/allow over-ruling
    • Create simulation option: "What if", existing business vs. new business, include external developments in the forecast model
    • Acceptance problems: "Corporate-political guidelines", "Are we ready yet?", …  are sometimes a hard verdict for managers to appreciate, be cautious when dealing with delicate managerial issues
    • Ensure link to action/intervention (strategic)
    • Chance to reflect for managers AND planners: questioning the human bias, space, trust and will
    • Strategic and operational planning: focus on strategic planning, corridor check (multidimensional view) for operational planning

This once again showed that practical implementation hurdles in terms of planning quality and security are primarily "politically” triggered" within the company. One lever in implementation is the focus on alignment within the company.

Charity: mulled wine for a good cause and evening's entertainment

A must: In the evening of the 1st day of the workshop, we visited the Nuremberg Christkindlesmarkt with our guests at the 8th Solyp 4.0 User Circle, just in time for Advent. In a festive atmosphere, we continued to exchange information on strategy topics, developments in the area of analytics and the Solyp platform. Social projects are supported with the sales proceeds at the "Nürnberg International" stand at the market of the twin cities.

Solyp platform: forecast for 2020

The second day of our user meeting started with the Solyp 4.0 product overview by Christian Ullbrich. He gave all participants an outlook on product developments, future features and what challenges can be expected.

As an Enterprise Cloud for Strategy, Solyp is also facing the task in 2020 of considering the increased complexity and dynamics in the markets and companies. At the same time, the strategic planning and implementation process must be mapped, adapted and controlled end-to-end. With the Microsoft Azure Cloud and its high standards and permanent further development, the current and future needs of Solyp can be met.

Solyp@Evonik: digital development of the strategy

The participants were particularly interested in the Use Case of Evonik Industries AG. In the presentation by Evgeni Zaprayanov, Senior Manager Regions Development at Evonik, we were given an exclusive insight into the structure and organization of the globally active company. He also showed how the company is using Solyp 4.0 to bundle its project portfolio of strategic initiatives in the regions and how management will in future be able to monitor the respective contribution of the initiatives to the company's goals. This will make it even easier to evaluate and assess current situations.

Evonik is one of the world's leading specialty chemicals companies. With more than 32,000 employees, the company operates in more than 100 countries and benefits particularly from its customer proximity and leading market positions.

Finally, our colleagues Stefan Raths and Ralf Koch showed how the migration path from Solyp3 to Solyp 4.0 will look like, depending on individual requirements.

We would like to thank all participants for the inspiring talks, exciting discussions and the open feedback!
Special thanks go to our speaker Evgeni Zapranov, who gave a look behind the scenes of strategy work at Evonik Industries and showed how valuable our Solyp platform is for the strategy team and management.
We are already looking forward to the next Solyp 4.0 User Circle!

By the way: If you want to keep up to date on the topic of analytics, you should regularly read our strategy blog. We will publish more background articles on this topic in the coming weeks. This way you won't miss any trends and can integrate efficient tools and the latest methodologies in your company at an early stage.

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