From Classroom to Real-World Insights: Students Discover ALDI Data and Analytics

Students Discover ALDI Data and Analytics

ALDI is pioneering innovative AI solutions to continuously optimize its processes and offerings. As a global company, it is actively seeking new talent in the field of Data Analytics – young professionals who can leverage data to generate insights and support optimal business decisions.

To identify top talent, RWTH Business School and ALDI's HR department organized a one-day field trip featuring a dynamic program of presentations and hands-on insights. Most of the participants are first-semester students in the M.Sc. Data Analytics & Decision Science program. They have technical backgrounds, such as in engineering, which they will further enhance over four semesters by gaining strong management expertise and essential soft skills, preparing them for responsible leadership roles after graduation.

Hot Topics in Data Analytics at ALDI

Kicking off the day, Markus Wolff, GenAI Lead at ALDI, presented an in-house AI tool that enables marketing teams to create creative recipe ideas - exclusively with ALDI ingredients - in just 5-10 minutes, complete with mouth-watering AI-generated images. This new process is much less time and resource consuming, as real cooking is no longer required. The accuracy of the algorithms ensures high quality, so that cooking these meals in real life matches the expectations set by the AI-generated images and descriptions.

Security and privacy are top priorities for ALDI. That's why they use secure, internal systems and avoid external AI tools like ChatGPT. This approach can sometimes slow down certain processes, but it ensures that sensitive company data is not inadvertently exposed online, where competitors could potentially access and misuse it. Nevertheless, there are several integrations into open-source systems, so the experts do not really start developing from scratch.

The afternoon brought even more insights. Konstantin Schmidt, Senior Data Scientist at ALDI, shared their data-driven approach to demand forecasting, where factors like weather data help to accurately forecast product sales in the stores, such as watermelons.

Practical Insights

Our students got to see this data in action at Germany's largest ALDI SÜD store, witnessing firsthand how ALDI collects and uses this data in real-time. They also toured a test center where ALDI experts explained how various cash register systems work and how they adapt to different customer payment habits around the world (because, let’s be honest, Germans are still big fans of cash - nobody knows why).

Daily Life as a Data Scientist

The day ended with Philipp Paraguya giving an in-depth look at the daily life of a Data Scientist at ALDI. To get a glimpse of what working in data analytics at ALDI Data and Analytics feels like, take a look at this video published by ALDI: