Michelin drives big data strategy with Microstrategy analytics

French firm Michelin has around 110,000 employees across its global operations, and generates most of its 20 billion revenues through the manufacture and sale of around one million tyres each year.

To gain more insight into its operations, the company has made its first steps in a big data analytics project that will process data from a variety of sources and provide feedback to business users.

One example is the ability to monitor defects in products at its manufacturing plants through Microstrategy dashboards, with three pilot projects currently underway in North America and plans to extend this to 67 facilities across the world.

"Each time we have defects on the tyres during the manufacturing process it is stored with a specific defect code, then we can analyse per product, per machine, per operator, how many defects we have in the plant. We know that this kind of dashboard can be updated every fifteen minutes so it is near real-time, so it is ready to steer activity in the plant," said Sebastien Douaillat, BI enterprise architect at Michelin.

"This is one of our first steps to use big data internally in the plants. Our machines are generating a lot of data, a lot of logs, so this is one of the use cases we will have in the near future."