Case Study: Continental Tires eliminates production bottlenecks with IBM Decision Optimization Center

Optimizing manufacturing of 10,000 products across 20 plants worldwide

Continental Tires, a major global tire manufacturer, faced the challenge of inefficiently planning production for its 10,000 different products across 20 plants using manual, error-prone spreadsheets. This complex process made it difficult to optimize machine capacity, avoid bottlenecks, and react to market changes. To gain a competitive advantage, the company partnered with IBM to implement a solution based on IBM Decision Optimization Center software.

The IBM solution, called FACT, automated data collection and used sophisticated optimization models to calculate the best product allocation across plants, considering millions of constraints. This enabled Continental Tires to predict and prevent bottlenecks, evaluate 30 times more what-if scenarios, and save planners up to 30% of their time. As a result, IBM helped the company drive smarter, more agile decision-making to maximize resource usage and increase revenues and profits.

Continental Tires

Niklas Steding

IT Project Lead