Becoming a Data-Driven Company

(a) Situation faced: medi, a leading provider of medical aids, is a German-based manufacturer, making it its mission to help people feel better. medi’s product portfolio includes compression, orthoses, and other medical products as well as sports and fashion products. With its impressive success and rapid growth, medi has faced the challenge of transforming itself into a digital and data-driven company. In particular, the historically grown structures in its infrastructure, data management, and missing data strategy were major obstacles to its transformation. At the same time, evolving customer demands and technological developments offered great opportunities to differentiate and optimize. (b) Action taken: In an effort to become a data-driven organization for better use of data for evidence-based management decisions, medi, in close cooperation with the Project Group Business & Information Systems Engineering of the Fraunhofer FIT, conducted a thorough analysis of the existing process and application landscape as well as its data management. In-depth interviews with internal and external experts, as well as a detailed analysis of existing systems, revealed the status quo and provided the basis for analyzing future development paths. medi used these findings to prioritize existing digital transformation (DT) projects, to identify new data-based services, and to improve internal processes and services. (c) Results achieved: The approach adopted by medi lays the fundament for becoming a data-driven organization and, thus, delivered two major contributions: First, by unveiling the process and application landscapes and the currently existing data logic, medi identified starting points for future development, such as current redundancies and weaknesses. This transparency forms a solid foundation for medi’s digital initiatives and development of a data strategy. Second, through a series of in-depth interviews, medi collected and prioritized important ideas and expectations for numerous exploitation and exploration projects as inputs for its data-related understanding, as an organization and at the individual level, as well as for its data strategy conception. (d) Lessons learned: In all divisions involved, medi’s project approach has led to a better understanding of the need for a uniform data structure, which in turn leads to a better match between management expectations and operational feasibility. In addition, the documented processes, application landscapes, and data logic act as a common foundation for the development of project roadmaps, enabling higher effectiveness and efficiency in business operations. As a result, medi has particularly benefited from a common understanding of what being a data-driven company means, which prerequisites need to be fulfilled, and which roles are involved in the management and usage of data.