A New BI Strategy for Standardized Processes at Liebherr

About Liebherr EMT

The Liebherr Group employs around 48,000 people worldwide. The company is decentralized and organized into eleven independent divisions. The Earthmoving (EMT) division manufactures a broad product portfolio at seven global production sites. Four of these sites have full product line responsibility (PLV plants).

BARC helped the Liebherr EMT Business Intelligence team develop a comprehensive BI strategy for one of its highest-revenue divisions.

The project in detail

The Challenge

Liebherr’s decentralized structure meant that EMT plants were operating with multiple siloed applications. It required extensive manual effort to create a unified, comprehensive view of divisional data. As the company grew in recent years, these decentralized solutions expanded as well—making it increasingly difficult to integrate data across sites.

Another challenge was bringing together BI expertise from all four PLV plants. Up until this point, BI leads at each plant had little interaction with one another.

The aim

Liebherr EMT set out to harmonize processes across locations and deliver comprehensive information more quickly and efficiently. To achieve this, they needed a new business intelligence strategy.

Project phase 1

In interactive workshops, BARC Senior Analyst for Data & Analytics, Robert Tischler, worked with the BI team to address two central questions. The first question was how to establish a “single point of truth” in the data architecture. This system needed to consolidate information from all plants and enable timely division-level decisions.

Project phase 2

Next, the question was how to structurally integrate BI expertise across the four PLV plants. This led to the concept of a Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC). With BARC’s support, the team clearly defined roles and responsibilities. They also successfully implemented the project-based reference architecture and role model into the BICC structure.

Liebherr EMT benefited greatly from BARC’s extensive market knowledge, more than 20 years of experience in evaluating software, and structured project methodology. This made them more confident in their decisions and minimized investment risk.

The result

With clearly defined organizational models, a robust data architecture, and a fully functioning BICC, Liebherr EMT laid the foundation for operating more efficiently with data. The company especially valued BARC’s fast, pragmatic and effective approach.

Robert Tischler’s experience and quick grasp of complex topics were key success factors. We achieved benefits on both a conceptual and organizational level. I am glad to have gained BARC as a strategic partner. We will continue our collaboration with Robert and BARC, particularly on strategic topics such as data governance. In addition, we also benefit from BARC’s network when we need specialized expertise in specific areas.

Mario Mühllechner

Head of BICC, Liebherr EMT