Daimler AG held the second DigitalLife Day in Fellbach near Stuttgart

• Information, Innovation, Inspiration: 500 Daimler employees experience the possibilities of digitalization first hand
• Ideas contest between ten employee teams
• Dr Dieter Zetsche, Chairman of the Board of Management of Daimler AG and Head of Mercedes-Benz Cars: “Our common goal must be to make Digital Life into a self-evident part of our culture. On a daily basis.”

Stuttgart, 19-May-2016 — /EuropaWire/ — Daimler AG unites the strengths of a global group with the flexibility of the young entrepreneurs’ scene. Driving digitalization across all corporate units is a decisive aspect of this strategy. That is why last Friday, the automotive manufacturer held the second DigitalLife Day in Fellbach near Stuttgart, which brought together 500 employees from many departments and locations under the motto “Information, Inspiration, Innovation”. Along with the group’s digital strategy and presentations by internal and external experts, in keeping with the kick-off event in 2015, the focus was on an employee ideas contest on digitalization.

Dr. Dieter Zetsche, Chairman of the Board of Management of Daimler AG and Head of Mercedes-Benz Cars, said: “Our common goal must be to make Digital Life into a self-evident part of our culture. On a daily basis. To be successful, this culture must give new ideas a real chance.”

The winner of last year’s DigitalLife Day employee ideas contest was the app “pacTris”. Meanwhile, the app – which will be launched shortly – was presented to the public at its own stand. The app enables scanning the bar codes of packages at the time of purchase in order to find out if all packages can fit in the user’s car.

“Digitalization is creating an exciting new era of mobility”, said Wilko Andreas Stark, Head of Daimler Strategy & Mercedes-Benz Cars Product Strategy and Planning. “That is why the digital transformation has top priority for us. In this respect, the decisive lever is the employees’ mindset. Because employees are the ones who provide us with the most valuable impulses.”

The ideas contest this year had ten competing employee teams. They presented their innovations in exciting and entertaining pitches every three minutes to an enthusiastic audience. As scarce winner from the strong field, the team of “Chatbot Messenger” prevailed. The idea behind “Chatbot Messenger” is to not only process customer inquiries by phone, but also to use the bundled reach of existing messengers and apps. Thus, a majority of queries are answered directly and with maximum comfort for the customers.

DigitalLife@Daimler: Leading the way in digital transformation
Daimler has been consistently pursuing the topic of digitalization for a long time and has made it into a core element of its strategy. The goal of the DigitalLife@Daimler Initiative is to develop and implement the key measures for addressing the digital transformation and to promote the culture of innovation. The DigitalLife@Daimler Initiative is supporting numerous digital projects for direct implementation in the business units and is promoting active dialogue between employees, top management and the Board of Management.
The success factor of the initiative depends on coworking across divisions and hierarchy. The initiative is facilitated – among others – by the DigitalLife Community and the DigitalLife Blog on the Intranet as well as by events and workshops such as DigitalLife Day, open discussion fora (Open-Spaces) and hackathons, at which employees develop new apps within a record time.

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Dr. Dieter Zetsche, Vorsitzender des Vorstands der Daimler AG und Leiter Mercedes-Benz Cars, mit den Teilnehmern des Ideenwettbewerbs // Dr. Dieter Zetsche , Chairman of the Board of Management of Daimler AG and Head of Mercedes-Benz Cars, with the all participants of the ideas contest.