Digitalisation and Its Human Dimension

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The digital transformation is a present challenge for many companies in a variety of fields. As Michal Fichtner, Head of Digitalization Operations at Continental Automotive emphasised at Trends in Automotive Logistics (TAL 2024), you need to thoroughly understand this process, and above all win over your people for it.

To a large extent, bringing any sort of digitalisation activity into a company means change. The company’s logic changes, and so do its processes and its employees’ work activities. That’s why it’s important to focus on your people’s mindset – among not just managers, but everyone who will be affected by the implementation. Fichtner points out that people’s typical obstacles to accepting new tools are fear of the unknown and reluctance to leave the beaten path. “I’ve been here twenty years, and things work. So why change them?” is Fichtner’s paraphrase of a typical response to digitalisation initiatives. In Fichtner’s opinion, fear combined with laziness is the greatest progress-killer. But without innovations, though they may feel like steps into the unknown, we’ll be stuck in place.

Digitising isn’t digitalising

According to Fichtner, exchanging a single machine or moving from paper to iPads is just digitisation. Digitalisation, meanwhile, necessarily involves process revisions or optimistions. The goal, he states, is a digital transformation where tools are gathered into a single solution, the company is truly digital and all of its data cooperates company-wide. As Fichtner emphasises, this is only possible when a firm’s people live for change, see its benefits and welcome digitalisation. He mentions the need for “positive ambassadors” who will help to spread information on the effects of digitalisation, but will not be part of the management.

A start-up inside the corporation

Fichtner likens the digital transformation process at Continental to the founding of a start-up inside the corporation. First a small task force was formed that invited employees to define their requests concerning their work. “We asked them what bothers them, meanwhile offering to help fix it. We verified these were objective problems, and through this process, we drew these people into our development programme. And really, they created the solution, with our aid,” Fichtner describes. He says the advantage of this approach is that people themselves want to use a solution produced like this, unlike tools dropped on them from above.

The entire team behind the digitalisation of Continental’s plant at Brandýs nad Labem, Czech Republic, was assembled from internal staff. “Only three were from IT; otherwise we had people from quality, industrial engineering, production etc.,” says Fichtner.

The job thief

Fichtner is not an advocate of the idea that digitalisation steals people’s jobs. But it can’t happen without some activity on their part. “You can work with people, educate them. And there’s nothing better than a stable employee who’s with you for several years, because then they bring the greatest added value,” Fichtner believes. He finds that a company’s advantage, in the future, will come not from digitalisation – which will be everywhere – but instead from well-trained personnel. “You will be differentiated by your people, who will go through digitalisation with you, they’ll take care of your digital factory, they’ll be sort of ‘your robots’ doctors,’” says Fichtner. He notes that Continental is also already working on the future competencies of today’s schoolchildren by organising programmes on various topics in primary schools.

Data is more valuable than gold

Digitalisations or digital transformations of any kind are based on data. Fichtner says data’s value is derived from its credibility. “For data to be credible, data collection must be configured properly. When it is not, and you can’t understand the data, or trust it, you can throw those outputs away,” he warns. Thus he believes each data item should have an owner, a clear acquisition process, with the minimisation of manual inputs being important during this. “It’s good when it has a certain granularity, so you can work well with it, and it needs to be handled using adequate tools,” Fichtner adds.

Until a company has resolved all this, it may have data, but that data is in an unmined, untapped form, just like gold that’s waiting under the ground. “I know cases of companies that have prepared reporting or another application, but then nobody used it, or trusted it. That is bad,” Fichtner states. The ideal scenario, he says, is when individual data systems are connected into an integration tool that shows all KPIs on a single page of the display.

“Catch the digitalisation train while it can still be caught. But do it in a way where it makes sense for you. If you start doing digitalisation just to do digitalisation, you won’t start connecting the system’s individual parts, and it won’t work across your whole company, you won’t make use of your company’s potential,” he said when closing out his presentation at TAL 2024.

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  Continental Automotive

Continental Automotive Czech Republic s.r.o. (Brandýs nad Labem) has become a new member of the World Economic Forum's Global Lighthouse Network, which unites leaders in digital technology and innovation. The Brandýs nad Labem facility is the first independent plant in the Czech Republic, as well as the first Continental plant, to join this prestigious network. This recognition was awarded to Continental for its swift implementation of innovations in production and its proactive adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies.

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