Change Management at REHAU Automotive: Digital Transformation in Practice

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What’s the most effective way to develop a company’s business? Michael Colberg, Chief Operations Officer at REHAU Automotive, has a clear-cut reply: Digitalisation. He presented his viewpoint in a presentation at the Trends in Automotive Logistics (TAL) 2024 conference, where he called above all for a pragmatic approach to the entire topic. According to Colberg, digitalisation is really not rocket science. “Don’t be afraid – just dive right in!” says this manager with three decades of experience in automotive.

REHAU Automotive employs about 7,000 people at 25 locations worldwide and supplies automotive components to leading global manufacturers. As its COO, Colberg feels responsible for ensuring this firm is able to adapt solutions – especially the highly practical ones. He considers himself a passionate user of digitalisation and sees it as an opportunity to move the company’s work and organisation ahead. “At REHAU Automotive, we manage digitalisation within three areas,” he revealed.

The first area is the digitalisation of information, that is, of an overly fragmented IT environment. The second area focuses on robotic process automation (RPA), which includes process standardisation, the entire field of finite elements (i.e. the application of numerical models in engineering production), data management and more. The third area involves artificial intelligence. “From the AI perspective, we’re interested in solutions that will advance our technologies and processes.” Colberg then went on to illustrate these three areas with five concrete examples. So the goals have been defined; what remains is to fine-tune the mindset. Colberg says the reaction you want to hear from the people in charge is: “Why not?” rather than “Yes, but…”, because the latter always means obstacles.

Simple integration

Information digitalisation is handled by the Maturity Level App integration tool, which collects information from individual systems and enables customer project management. “It’s possible to work immediately with information coming from our individual teams. The application is also connected to Teamcenter – a Siemens solution for engineering. Another tool collects all relevant project information, and there is a project portfolio as well. We have a traffic-light system indicating our project statuses. This app can be used on a mobile device or over a web interface,” says Colberg, adding that more than a thousand REHAU Automotive employees across a variety of departments have access to the application.

He emphasises that for digitalisation projects, it is very important to start small. “You don’t need to start with the most complex thing ever. You need quick and functional solutions; expensive, long-term ones will bury your entire effort. Successful deployment of a simple system, on the other hand, encourages your company team to move on to the next phase,” he explains.

The heart of digital production management

Another output from the first phase of the digitalisation process was OPS Analytics, a tool for evaluating, visualising and monitoring operational KPIs, built up from a standard web browser. Here, too, the main motivation was to integrate. “When I joined REHAU Automotive in 2020, everyone had their own kind of visualisation and KPI tracking. Everything differed from everything; there was no standard that would truly let us compare performance across our individual facilities. So I suggested: Let’s create a huge ‘data lake,’ put all our data inside it, and extract meaningful outputs that we’ll be able to access from computers, tablets and phones. We’ll do it in a way that ensures the data is relevant and is recorded in real time without manual input. So we devised precisely such a tool. Only a few months passed from the initial idea to the first usage,” says Colberg, who notes that this tool has also been deployed at all REHAU Automotive operations and is extremely popular at all levels thanks to its simplicity. The system monitors 55 KPIs and has around 1,100 users; meanwhile, Colberg states that it only cost the company about 500,000 euros.

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Watch Michael Colberg’s entire presentation from TAL 2024 (this video is in English) >>

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A simple tool with a big impact

The third example of digitalisation at REHAU Automotive pertains to Robot Process Automation (RPA), which addresses the need for process optimisation and automation. Once again, the task was to get rid of unintegrated systems and manual procedures that are time-consuming and ultimately expensive.

As proof of RPA’s functionality, Colberg presented a project named ‘Bedarfskapazitäts-Management’ Process (Demand-Capacity Management Process), developed in collaboration with REHAU client Mercedes Benz. He illustrated time savings of up to 80% compared to his firm’s previous methods, which had involved many manual steps. The input data is information from planning centres and status information for their production input resources. “No one enters anything manually; it’s all generated automatically from the data entered into our systems. We launched this tool in the course of four weeks. And the best part is that people like it, because they see how they’re doing meaningful work instead of mindless data entry,” says Colberg.

A coordination twin

Colberg’s conclusion dealt with in-house logistics. No matter how automated they may be, they need to be coordinated perfectly in order to be maximally effective. “Everything happened in sequences – our forklifts weren’t managed by collective intelligence. So we looked around to see if there was an attainable solution for handling effective coordination – and we concluded this was a good area to address through AI. That’s how our ‘twin tool’ came about,” Colberg explains, referencing a tool whose name is an acronym of Transport, Warehouse & Integrated Network. “We wanted to see what more we could get from all of our individual systems, such as SAP, MES, receipt of goods and production control, to create the most effective transport request management system – one that best accounts for our requirements and capacity,” says Colberg, adding that this project is still underway and is being carried out in collaboration with various divisions and partners of REHAU Automotive.

Helping designers

As another example of the use of artificial intelligence, Colberg mentioned a tool called Engineering Cockpit. “This tool is used for analysis of components. It creates standardised reports and provides designers with guidelines and tips on how to reuse a solution for further customers, so it offers a new perspective on our designers’ work,” Colberg notes.

As REHAU Automotive’s COO notes, the company does not have a unified digitalisation strategy. “We created a council composed of volunteers from throughout the company – people who want to change things and who can make quick decisions. What’s crucial here is willingness and support. We’d rather say ‘Let’s try it’ than ‘Yes, but...’ That’s why we started with small, simple steps – and we’re satisfied. What’s more, it also creates a positive atmosphere,” Colberg said at the close of his TAL 2024 presentation.

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