Starting with a bold vision and a CEO dedicated to make it happen, Scania, the major Swedish manufacturer of commercial vehicles, is exploring new creative ways to become data driven. One initiative standing out is the Citizen Data Scientist Campus, an education program designed by Combient Mix to provide machine learning and data science training to employees beyond the existing analytics teams.

A lake and a liability

“Scania should be the advanced analytics leader in industrial products.” That was the vision statement made by the company CEO Henrik Henriksson a couple of years ago. About the same time, Scania started an Information Management Journey to utilize their data in a more efficient way, which in turn lead to creating their data lake. “Despite the data lake being a crucial part of our journey, we soon realized it would not be enough to just gather vast amounts of data, we would also need skilled people to work with it,” says Pär Berg, Head of Advanced Analytics at Scania.

Pär and his team initially focused their efforts on hiring data scientists and collaborating with matching units internally, but though the analytics team expanded, it would not be enough to move an entire organization into working with data. “Our data scientists often get caught up in the big cases, with multiple processes and multiple data sources, that can run for years, while there is a need for supporting other parts of the company too. We will only reach a data driven Scania when more people start to explore new ways of working with data “ Pär explains. “When data science is closely connected to business processes, that’s where it can really make a difference.”

“If you can do monte carlo simulation, why not do machine learning.”

“You should not have to queue for the data scientists to come and help as a task force, but you should be able to solve those problems yourself,” Annette Hultåker, Concept Developer for Advanced Analytics at Scania fills in. We got inspired by the concept of citizen data scientists, and the major need for upskilling internal competences, but it was tough to get a movement going. In conversation with Combient, Pär and Annette learned about a data science campus that Combient Mix had already designed. “It matched our needs very well,” says Pär.

This was during the fall 2018. The intention was to run a joint program with more companies from the network and 5-10 scholars per company, but Scania found an interest reaching beyond the intended handful employees. “Dedicating time for learning will always compete with all other things. This was set out to be a challenging program, not everyone could do it, and it would ask you to set aside a day per week. It would really need to be prioritized. Thankfully, a lot of the managers that have sent participants to this course have understood the big Why, much thanks to a clear direction from our CEO already from start,” Pär explains.

Co-designing a campus

So with Scania as design partner, they got the opportunity to influence the soon-to-be-piloted campus. “The Mix team have really listened in to our needs”, says Annette.

The Scania tailored program, later named Citizen Data Scientist Campus, would include five weeks of theory, onboarding and basic understanding of machine learning and statistics through weekly hand-in assignments. Then followed by five weeks of domain based case work closely related to the scholars’ daily operations.

The campus did also include a weekly co-location, a big conference room in various spaces, “to get out of the office”, with data scientists from either Combient or Scania present as tutors supporting the scholars with the hand-in assignments and with the cases.

Moments of progress

The first campus kicked off on March 27, 2019. It included 24 participants ranging between engineers from the R&D department, financial and process analysts and even one from HR, “some new and some really experienced, with a variety of years within Scania,” Annette explains.

The weekly co-locations was a crucial success factor in many ways, and became a space for personal experiences and moments of progress. “We had people shouting of joy when they had reached a certain milestone. I remember one particularly, she had been struggling for weeks to combine two data sets from manually maintained excel sheet. And when she finally made it work, she just screamed out,” Annette says and laughs. “I also remember on one occasion when two of the participants had a sudden realization of how much work the task at hand would actually require, which they then decided to put in. When one of them came back to the next co-location announcing that her newly added effort really made a difference, it spurred the other ones to do the same,” Annette continues. “And they sometimes did not want to go home. We had to say, guys, we are closing!”.

Celebrating, and continuing to push

Concluding the premier course, with four innovation submissions filed already by the end of the first 10 weeks, results really did exceeded expectations. Through their Citizen Data Scientist Campus, Scania has been able to raise the general awareness and understanding around data among their employees; execute on the utilization strategy of their data lake, and; do good for the company’s image as an attractive employer.

Moving one step closer towards their vision together with their employees, “the participants have gotten into the reality behind the vision and perhaps more importantly, something they can bring back to develop further and integrate to their daily work. Many are very happy about their personal achievements” says Pär.

As for the future, Scania is looking at a second round for the coming fall, as well as how to follow up on the participants from round one, integrating them with the existing data science network to begin with. “We should remember these participants have just started their journey,” says Annette, ”and now it is up to Scania to take care of this gained knowledge, while we educate more people on our mission to democratize data science.”