Whether they are multinational corporations or hidden champions, companies in the developing and manufacturing industry are facing enormous challenges due to advancing digitalization. Growing demands for flexibility, shorter development and product life cycles, and new business models are permanently changing the way data is handled as a factor in production. However, in order to use data to generate value across the product life cycles, suitable prerequisites in the form of processes, methods and technology need to be put in place to make the transformation of raw data into usable information manageable while at the same time incorporating domain know-how.

The DPDA (data preparation for data analytics) project group unites industry users, system vendors and the research community under a common vision of developing a universal, standardized and adaptable tool for process-driven data preparation. In joint workshops, participants discuss practical use cases and best practices that demonstrate, among other things, that the systematization of data preparation and anchoring it as an integral part of product development and production have the potential to facilitate control and optimization of complex processes and products. With the development of role and procedure models, the project group is making an initial contribution to putting the existing wealth of experience to real use in industry.