Event: Operational Excellence with AI, Salzkuchen and beer
12. Mai 2026, from 6pm to 9pm(...10.30pm)
Westfälischer Industrieklub, Dortmund
There are 3.4 million SMEs in Germany alone,
and 95% of them still struggle to translate digital capabilities into operational impact.
The topic of the evening was “Operational Excellence with AI” (with onion cake and beer… and currywurst).
- Keynote 1: Operational Excellence – past, present, and future
- Operational Excellence does not change; it evolves. Existing principles last, while new elements are added.
- Tools change, methods evolve, principles remain.
- Doing the right things right, often and a lot.
- Keynote 2: Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence
- A hidden danger for any organization: lack of transparency. Why do things actually work?
- The answer is Business Intelligence: real transparency, honest analysis, and immediate decision-making capability.
- The foundation is data warehousing: unstructured, raw data is transformed into a trustworthy data basis for BI and AI.
- Case study: chatbot interface to a complex database structure. (…even world champions still cannot be predicted from historical data alone.)
- Keynote 3: Automation and Artificial Intelligence
- AI is the greatest democratization of automation to date: today, far more processes can “run in parallel” than ever before.
- Knowledge management in particular is being fundamentally transformed and accelerated by AI.
- The development of the technology is exponential: never again will it be as easy to familiarize yourself with AI and get started as it is today.
- Case study: sales team & process automation (…but accountability remains with humans.)
- Casual get-together with food and drinks and plenty of discussion around AI.
- What is already possible today?
→ A lot, because the technology is here and accessible to 6 billion people; it is more than just hype.
- What are we doing today, what are we using today?
→ Surprisingly little (only 3% of users pay for AI); the 0.3% who are shaping the game show the other 99.7% spectators how it’s done.
- Where is the journey heading?
→ AI will change a lot, everywhere and fundamentally, especially in the context of knowledge management and data.
- Personal experiences and best practices
→ Participants presented their first projects and were able to demonstrate steep learning curves.
- Many introductions, happy networking, and a successfull evening for all.
