Leveraging insights for smart decisions at Goodyear

Stefan Wilms: I think we have this. Good morning welcome and thanks for the opportunity to present. Just to make this clear, this is not a sales pitch, right? Consider this a testimony of a happy customer. And my colleague Sandra and I, we hope that this will be anyhow interesting and useful for you. We just learned last night that our colleagues from Pirelli are also in the room.

And a warm welcome to them as well. Although we have real tire experts in the room we try to avoid any specific expressions or abbreviations from this industry sector. Anyway, if there’s any question anything unclear, just come to us later and we’ll explain or raise your hand during the presentation and we’ll try to answer.

Having said that, I hand over to Sandra.

Sandra Gonzales Rodrigo: Thank you, Stefan. And good morning, everybody. This is our agenda for today. And what we wanted to share with you is a real example of how. CI and MI come together, which in our case is through The use of the same platform, which is Valona Plaza, and we will give some more details later about it.

We will cover who we are, what we do, how we work together how our journey to Valona Plaza has been, and the benefits and lessons learned. And there will be some time for Q& A, like Stefan said, but if there will be no time to cover all the questions or… Not with all the details needed. Feel free to reach out to us later during the breaks.

Stefan Wilms: Yeah, just about the Valona Plaza. So that’s the brand name of Valona. We don’t use that in Goodyear. So we have our own name for that, which is called Prometheus. We like to use these code names if you want, so people can recognize in the company. In this case, Prometheus is coming from a Greek mythology.

And it’s coming from the word I’m not sure if I pronounced it correctly, Promethea which means to predict or to foresee. So the project manager saw that’s a good name and that’s how people see it in our company on the screen when they started.

So quick one. This is more about the, how we work together, but anyhow, just a quick one. About Goodyear tires. A multibillion dollar company, American company. More than 70, 000 associates around the globe in more than 50 facilities. We’re everywhere. And you can see there’s not really a surprise.

We 125th anniversary. We have two innovation centers around the globe which is our R and D. And you can see from the patents that this company is really driven by innovation. We constantly have to innovate to survive. Those of you who know the manufacturing sector. That’s usually a very old school mindset, right?

So that sometimes is a little contradictory to constantly innovate. But those of you who come from Europe, which I guess most of that constantly innovate means in the tire business twice a year, you have to create the best product one for summer, one for winter year on year. So we believe we’re quite good in that.

So that made us believe that made us survive 125 years. We had the good times, the bad times, but we’re still there and we hope to be there for the next 125 years, 25 years as well. Just about the R& D driven company. So these two innovation centers, these R& D centers, just to put things into perspective.

They have 2, 500. scientists and engineers and supporting staff, almost equally shared between the headquarters in Akron, Ohio and in Luxembourg in Colmar Berg, where the Grand Duke has his small castle. We’re an old company, we only have one product, tyres, seems to be very boring. But we also changing slowly our mind.

So we are moving towards a mobility company, right? So I let Sandra explain a bit about that.

Sandra Gonzales Rodrigo: Because besides the long history, we have been entire manufacturer. We also, we are also transitioning into a mobility provider. We notice how the market is changing and today our customers. I don’t want to buy just a good tire.

They want to buy a good tire with the service around it. And if we put ourselves in the shoes of a fleet manager, they need good tires, but they also need the service around it. So their life is easier. They can optimize the way they are managed. And at the end of the day, optimize their cost. That is what is important to them.

Luxembourg is a very important country for Goodyear. We have a lot of facilities there and the country is very small. So it’s a big part of the country. What is occupied by Goodyear facilities? Indeed is one of the main employers of the country with over 3000 people working there. It’s also the home or.

The base for the European track team. So it’s where the team that takes care of all the tires that are not car tires or light vehicle tires. So tires fitted on tracks, buses, trailers, any kind of vehicle that is not on the conventional roads main mining machinery, construction, forklifts. And even airplanes that is all managed at the European level from Luxembourg.

And there is also a very big footprint in terms of research and development. And I think Stefan, this very well from inside.

Stefan Wilms: Yes. So as I said before, so we have one of our two innovation centers in Luxembourg. We have there around 1, 100. People working. We’re really a melting pot off more than 50 nationalities.

You also have to see the geographical location of Luxembourg. It’s in between France, Germany. And it’s also an area where there’s not much industry. Everybody thinks of Luxembourg as the financial center, but young scientists and engineers, they really find a place in the few manufacturing companies in Luxembourg in one, One is good year.

Maybe a small side note here because people ask why are you a manufacturer? Why are you in Luxembourg? It’s a tax haven. It’s a high cost country. So from the labor cost, it’s very expensive. But this goes really back to times after the Second World War where General Patton also freed a small town, Ettelbrück.

There’s a memorial in every corner. So the Americans wanted to extend their footprint to Europe at the time, and they got already some tax benefits and built their first truck tire factory in farmland, Luxembourg. At that time there was no finance, there was a little mining industry in the south, and others were only…

So they’re there since the 50s and expanded since then. So in the safety instructions, when you learn for example, fire protection, when this burns down, it will probably never be built up again. Last thing, there’s still Americans that don’t know where Luxembourg is. They say, in which part of Germany is this city?

So R& D, yes, so we have the R& D, I mentioned that already. But just for the, for those enthusiasts of you, we, you might also see that on the picture, we have a huge test track. So we have a testing operation with 120 people staff. We have about 40 test drivers. There’s former race drivers as well driving for us.

We have the track where we test tires for trucks and for passenger cars. But our test drivers are also allowed to go on the open road, and they have special permission to also ignore the speed limits.

You might be wondering why we are together on stage. Since through this, let’s say, vehicle, the CI, the MI platform we were growing together and therefore we thought it might be useful if we both explain where we’re coming from and how we know are able to collaborate in a better way.

So I’m representing the global function in the company. So I’m coming from R and D. I don’t know if it’s the same in your areas but in good year, the competitive intelligence is in the R and D sector. At that, we are part of the knowledge management office, which has three different areas. And we are distributed across the innovation centers.

And we are providing services to all the regions and all the functions in the company.

Sandra Gonzales Rodrigo: And from the market research and intelligence parts, this is structured in a different way. We are not a global function, but the regional function. In my case, for example, I am part of the European team or EMEA team, and we’ve seen this geographical scope of Europe or EMEA.

We are also focused on a specific business unit, which is track tires. And then we have all their separate market intelligence teams that are taking care of the other geographies or other business units.

Stefan Wilms: I must also say that the competitive intelligence team as a global function only exists less than 10 years.

That doesn’t mean we have never done competitive intelligence before, but it happened in project and business units and so on. And less than 10 years ago, the company decided we need to centralize that.

So here we just, this looks probably familiar to all of you, how our daily work looks like, and that has not changed much in the previous year. So we do targeted studies like whatever, a new topic in the market, autonomous vehicles. What does it mean for the tire industry? Typical topic from the, for the CI team, we get our requests usually from the management and top management.

So really strategic. Topics we need to look into. We do continuous monitoring for different departments, global manufacturing, how is Pirelli doing, where are they building their next plant, how big is it going to be, what technology inside. We provide quarterly updates for the financial department as well.

So they have the financial figures, but we, let’s say a support that with news from the market. We act as a center of competence. We maintain our network of CI contacts in the company. We also act proactively where we or we see what’s happening in the world, pick topics and give it back to the managers and say, has anybody looked into this?

This is important. This is the next big thing. Have a look. Yeah. And we’ll maintain the skills and the platform.

Sandra Gonzales Rodrigo: And on the market intelligence side, our main pillar and the number one pillar for us is industry forecasting. It’s very important for us to track how the industry is developing, if it’s growing, how much, but this is the past and we cannot change it.

So what is really important for us is to have an understanding on how the industry can develop in the future. Short term and long term. And of course, to support this this pillar, we have the activities around reporting inside generations that are helping. and ultimately we are a business supporting function because all the data, all the insights that are generated within market research are used as a base for all the business cases from our colleagues from different departments.

And then we have another pillar that is also very important and it has grown a lot in importance over the last years and is data excellence because we transition from a situation where we had data here and there scattered all around and two different data sources were not talking to each other. So it was very messy situation.

And we are transitioning from there into a centralized data repository where everything is in one place. Data flows automatically there, wherever it’s possible. Updates are done automatically as well, whenever it’s possible. And the fact that everything is organized in one place. allows us as well to link the dots between two sources, and therefore we can generate more advanced analytics that in the past.

And then, of course, we need to be the like the little antenna of Goodyear to know what is happening outside, what are the trends of the market, and Ultimately, we also want to focus a lot on sharing the knowledge, because we think that the data should be available to everybody. Not just people should come us, come to us to ask, I need this number, but data should be available to the relevant teams and in a timely manner.

Stefan Wilms: If you stay one second on this. So until this point, this is how we work, how we do it for years. Until this point, we didn’t even know each other. We work in the same company, in the same location. I didn’t even know that she existed. So we, everybody’s doing the job. That may be similar in your companies.

There’s, as of a certain size, you have the silos or although everybody wants to avoid them, right? So until here we are doing our daily job. I didn’t even know that she was using the software we pro were providing to the rest of the company. So she was one of the customers and I didn’t even know. So then what happened?

And I make this quick. We see, I see we have around nine minutes. So what happened is that it’s also nothing unusual. A few years ago as Tom mentioned, we acquired another. And then you might know that as well, that’s the normal stuff. There’s an integration project. How can we integrate this company match the cultures and so on.

So they had a solution. We had a solution. They had a solution. So the normal thing is okay. We had to compare which to take because we don’t want to take the two of them. So we did a little analysis. We analyzed also what can be. What is the future demand. So if we go through this project to see, okay, how can we make it even better than the sum of the two that’s where Sandra comes into the game that she says, Hey, we are a user.

Can we have a word and say what else we want to have? Finally, that we had the decision to go for the Valona Plaza. We did all the transition and testing. And then we had in January, Our big launch event, one, two, three, and four, just to put things there again. And into perspective is a project of around 12 to 18 months, all in all, and the launch was in January.

So here, and just a few points. Basically what you can see on the left hand side, we had our own. Goodyear hosted a SharePoint solution. We got files every day from another supplier with news items and insights. We had to do all the manual curation, put it in the system, upload, verify, share with people, everything manually, emails and so on.

A lot of work also for the team and limited reach of the market. That was the old world. Then we switched to

Sandra Gonzales Rodrigo: Prometheus. The new world. And now the grass is much greener than before. We have an automated news editing function. It’s now a hosted solution. With a single sign on, which is really convenient that you don’t need to enter your credentials over and over again.

You have the possibility to add comments. You can create collections, newsletters, and in a very easily way, by the way, it takes really less time than it used to take me in the past to create a newsletter. You can subscribe to alert if there is any topic that you’re interested, you can target your topics.

And we have some big pluses as well. For example, we are having significantly much more new news items than in the past. There is a better local media coverage as well. And the fact that the solution is leveraging AI, it help us as well because in the past we had a situation with a limited amount of news.

And if you wanted to summarize those news so people can know what it’s about, you still need one person to summarize. What is it about? For a limited scope. Now we have a big scope and a summary that is generated by AI. And last but not least, the user friendly interface is actually quite helpful. And we see it with our colleagues.

That’s because we are MI and CI. So for us, it’s normal to go there to search for information. But for other colleagues, for example, in the engineering team, it’s not they are not so keen on doing that. But if the We see that if the interface is user friendly, they are now sometimes them even faster than us and tell us, Hey, have you seen the latest news at this?

So it’s really helping the other teams as

Stefan Wilms: well. So we have more Intel, better customer service, less administration, and which allows us to take faster strategic decision. Just a snapshot. That’s the landing page. You don’t, you might not see the details. Actually, it’s quite funny. So we have a Twitter ticker.

It’s just the latest Pirelli message on it. But it was not planned that there’s a Pirelli person here today. You have the stock exchange infos. And some items where users can quickly go to what they are interested in, like you see on top, we have the different regions. So Sandra not interested in what is happening, Asia Pacific on also America.

Directly goes to what’s happening in, in Europe. And I see we are running out of time. So we just have a, we have a thousand registered users already, which I believe is quite huge. We have different groups for different subjects different alerts on different subjects as Sandra. Explained before and basically most of it somehow also configurable to your needs.

Just a little feedback from our launch event, which I think I’m not sure how it’s in your companies, but for Goodyear, this was quite impressive. So we had two launch events in January. Both times, more than 700 registered participants, that is already impressive, but 90 percent stayed until the end of the session, which is very unusual.

Now, normally after five minutes, people say, okay, boring, I go to the next thing. So we really see. That really got a point here with our users. That’s what they needed. That’s what they use. And that’s what we also see that we have now 1, 000 registered users already. And I really the last comment where people say this is the coolest thing I have seen in Gojira.

Yeah. Two and a half minutes. Lessons learned and outlook. Although the launch was only in January, we had a big success, people really like it. And every user basically wants to see almost every day what’s happening in the world. We still need to get Traffic on the portal and also make people use it to, to collaborate.

There’s some details, some functionality in the tool. You can ask Valona about it, but we can see how the users are using the portal to get more traffic. We need to also keep them in the loop. That means we also have to be active and provide updates to them share alerts and collections.

So that. We make sure that also in the future they are staying on the portal and not get bored.

Sandra Gonzales Rodrigo: Also, another important point is that we learned that questions and comments should be handled quickly because otherwise people tend to forget, lose interest, so you need to be engaged with the audience and respond as fast as

Stefan Wilms: possible.

That’s why I appreciate that we have Sandra and some other colleagues representing other business units. They come with a lot of ideas. They also found a lot of bugs, I must say and we really need to be. Very proactive to get this solved and improves the system according to their needs.

Sandra Gonzales Rodrigo: And also what we want to do or what our main goal is to get people to have Prometheus. in the back on their browser. So every time they have a question on a specific topic, they should go there, search for the topic, whatever is their geography, their subject and find information there because it’s very easy for them to do that.

Stefan Wilms: We also got a new, some new ideas, what other topics we should cover in the future. So today Prometheus is just representing. The tire world, right? But there’s more information out there. So we spoke to our innovation labs, one in San Francisco, and they have new ideas. So where’s the startup section? We don’t have that yet, but we are working on that.

Sandra Gonzales Rodrigo: And another point is that the tool is offering, we think, a very good balance between artificial intelligence and human intelligence. And with any of the two alone, we wouldn’t be getting the same level that we get by combining both of them.

Stefan Wilms: Yeah. Then of course you see the regular trainings that goes together with the first point.

So to get also more traffic, there’s also fluctuation in the team. So whatever there’s a new manager in the finance team, new people, we provide regular trainings to keep them also updated.

And the regular exchange, of course, was Valona. So we have, we can say that every two weeks we have a meeting with the core team to discuss what happened, what’s good, what’s bad, what are. Suggestions for the future, and then they’re working on that. Okay, we are 44 minutes over time, sorry for that. I’m not sure if we have time for questions or, otherwise you, now you know our faces, you can come to us also in the breaks, and we hope this was somehow interesting for you.

We seem to have a burning

Sandra Gonzales Rodrigo: question over here, please.

Q&A: No. Actually, it’s more like a question slash suggestion. It’s been nine months since you guys have started that have you thought of what Jay mentioned earlier measuring the impact of that?

Stefan Wilms: To hear you if you can also introduce yourself, please.

Q&A: Hello everyone Do you guys hear me? Perfect. I’m Indra, I work for the company Tromf. We’re basically into lasers. Someone in the Stuttgart region, if you saw our laser touching the sky, then you know which company I’m working for. My question was that you’ve started this since nine months.

It’s been launched, it’s been launched since nine months. Have you guys found out how to measure the impact of this tool? And if not, then Jay can help

Stefan Wilms: you guys. Thanks for the proposal. That might be a good option. Actually, yeah, it’s nine months. It’s probably too early, but we are working on that. Good luck.

The management is currently busy with the budget planning for the next year. But I’m expect, I’m expecting this answer already at the latest in early January. Yes.

Q&A: Because if I would be on your management team and I see the slide which you showed that there was the suppository or your head tool that needed to be manually updated and everything.

My question would be what do you do with the saved time

Stefan Wilms: now? Yeah, actually that we answered in the beginning of the project. Because we also had to justify the cost. And why do we need a system at all, right? Okay, two systems or no system. We had to go through that cycle already. And that took some time.

In the beginning. So of course you’re right. So now we got the cost approved. We have the system, but then of course the next question is, was it worth it? Is it still that you deliver against what you promised at that time? Thank you.

Perfect.

Hello, Christian Böhm from Karlsdorz. We’re also using the system, and I would like to know, you have used SharePoint before, so do you still use SharePoint in addition, or have you moved every content from the SharePoint also to the Valona system? Ah, very good question. Both. So of course the transition of the existing insights and news items was, I think, one of the biggest parts of the project.

And that also required a lot of testing. So we have done that, but we also had in our previous solution, some, let’s say restricted area where we still keep. some files for the team use internal use only. We know that’s not a future proof solution, but this was a, was the priority first priority. So we’re working on the other part as well.

All right. Thank you, Stefan. Thank you so much, Sandra, for sharing the insights with us. And of course, a round of applause.