Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS
Collaboration with BHS Corrugated and a hackathon to kick off the Joint Lab
BHS Corrugated Maschinen- und Anlagenbau GmbH and our Center for Applied Research on Supply Chain Services SCS have founded the »Joint Lab Data Analytics«, a pioneering new format for collaboration between research and industry. Scientists and company staff work together in small, agile, interdisciplinary development teams for a fixed period of time in a creativity-enhancing »Work 4.0« environment with a view to solving specific issues facing the company.
BHS Corrugated is a global market leader in the development and production of corrugating rolls, corrugators, and their individual assemblies and has adopted the digital transformation as a key component of its corporate strategy in order to transition toward intelligent products and processes. By doing so, the company hopes to raise its service level, optimize operational processes and related experience-based decision-making, and compensate for the limited supply of qualified data scientists.
This three-year collaboration aims to push forward with the digital transformation of BHS Corrugated and expand the company’s data analytics expertise on a lasting basis. We are providing not only data analytics expertise but also skills and consultancy services in the area of business transformation. Compared with classical cooperation formats, this model allows us to acquire more comprehensive insights into the company and therefore to provide more in-depth scientific support.
On July 12, 2019, the »Hack-ADA-thon – Inspired by BHS Corrugated« was held as the kick-off event for the Joint Lab. Five teams were given eight hours to work on a real-world problem derived from one of the Joint Lab’s use cases. The participants – developers, students, doctoral students, and graduates in the fields of statistics, data science, computer science, mechanical engineering, and mathematics – developed creative solutions rooted in data analytics and optimization. The results were fed into subsequent work at the Joint Lab. At the same time, the Hack-ADA-thon served as a recruitment event, giving participants a chance to learn about job opportunities in data analytics at BHS Corrugated and Fraunhofer IIS.
