Learn how tesa, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of adhesive tapes and self-adhesive product solutions, combines more than 30 datasets to improve operations and take advantage of IoT technology – all through Snowflake’s Data Cloud.
As one of the world’s leading manufacturers of self-adhesive product solutions, tesa knows the importance of maintaining the quality of its 7,000 products. Doing so, and ensuring operational efficiency, is key to the company’s current success and future growth ambitions. And an integral part of that is putting data to good use.
The company wanted to modernize its data environment to support a large fleet of connected assets, in a way that needed minimal upskilling for its data team. To meet this need, tesa required a platform that could handle varied datasets, quickly and at scale.
A revolutionary data platform without the need for radical reskilling
Like many large manufacturers, tesa has data spread across a wide range of use cases, from production, ERP, and CRM data to that from the shop floor, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, and social channels.
To enable data-driven insights with all that data accounted for, the company implemented a hybrid analytics platform approach, powered by Snowflake’s Data Cloud.
“We needed to clear a large data backlog to do things faster—including producing reports at high speed,” said Sanjeev Kumar, Head of Data Management and Analytics at tesa. “By using Snowflake’s platform as the analytical engine behind our Power BI and SAP data, we now have a much more governable data solution. We can load and transform data much faster than before.”
This speed brings new efficiencies to tesa’s internal processes, and allows the company to experiment freely with an eye to improving the efficiency of its production.
“With data processing and analytics, you sometimes want to fail fast to answer your most pressing production questions. That view can accelerate time to market. Snowflake gives us more of these capabilities,” added Kumar.
A world where (coding) language barriers no longer exist
As part of the company’s data platform evaluation, tesa looked at all its centralized and decentralized data throughout the company. The team realized that most of its in-house skills centered around SQL and Python, but some of its people also worked in less common programming languages. This meant its chosen data solution had to cater to a wide array of user needs.
After testing, tesa recognized its team could handle data in each user’s preferred language with Snowpark, Snowflake’s developer framework for functional coding languages like Python, Java, and Scala.
The platform also offered significant benefits for application development, which helped tesa to accelerate the development of internal, data-driven applications that help users make better decisions.
To this end, the company used Streamlit, an open-source app framework for machine learning and data science teams that allows users to turn data scripts into shareable web apps in minutes.
“Snowflake is an enabling platform for our data scientists.” said Kumar. “Everything is about time-to-market. Streamlit helps us simplify complexity, particularly when it comes to our data science use cases.”
Outstanding performance and near-limitless integration possibilities—with governance at the heart
With Snowflake’s Data Cloud, tesa has built a stable and reliable data environment that will stand the test of time, power near-endless use cases, and allow the company to take full advantage of the promise of IoT.
“We are integrating IoT data from our production machines within Snowflake to gain granular product-level analysis,” explained Jan-Niklas Pahl, Industry 4.0 Manager at tesa. “That allows us to improve quality control, efficiency, and machine reliability.”
The company has also been able to enhance its established data access protocols to improve governance: “Snowflake helps us to change access rules a lot easier and a lot more quickly than before,” said Pahl. “We now have a single point of truth in our hybrid analytics approach, meaning there’s no need to use another system for governing access.”
This blend of security and flexibility means that tesa can now integrate more and more systems within Snowflake’s Data Cloud, adding huge volumes of data to the platform in just minutes and pushing it to production in less than an hour.
The journey’s only just begun
With an established data environment in the cloud, tesa is now focusing its efforts on expanding the number of internal departments that can benefit from self-service insights.
“By allowing our colleagues to perform their own analysis, we’re committed to enabling our organization to make the most of data,” Kumar said. “Ensuring data quality and ease of data collection is currently at the top of our agenda, too. Snowflake allows us to do that. And it will also give our sustainability team the flexibility to analyze data to improve our products and overall operations.”