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26 AUTODATA ASKS » DATA ANALYSIS June 2018 | AutoData By André Barros Disclousure/McKinsey Co-founder of the data analysis British company which was born in Formula 1 in 2009. QuantumBlack is specialized in combining and analyzing data that help the teams to promote significant performance improvements during the GPs, as from the car itself as the racing strategy as well. From an exclusive systematic the company started to offer its services to other segments, such as the industry in several sectors, the automotive in particular. In 2015, QuantumBlack was acquired by McKinsey Consulting, which expanded its services to Latin America. Simon Williams, of QuantumBlack No. We started in Formula 1 and from a sports perspective but now we are more present in areas of complex engineering in advanced industries such as the automotive and aerospace. Those areas, besides pharmaceutical and financial services are our largest activity area. Sports, anyway, represent a fantastic cutting edge laboratory. For example: about car development in racing, they don’t develop one front wing, they develop ten, even with subtle differences during the season. So we identify which of these ten wings can offer the best performance in each track. In the case of an automaker that is going to develop a new vehicle the biggest challenges are time, cost and quality. We see the car as a network of 12 thousand connected parts and, this way, we explore the development processes in a totally different way. Putting everything together we can reduce 10% of the time to launch a car in the market, from the beginning of the project to the arrival at the stores. When we started the company, 9 years ago, all founders had a background in Formula 1, from race strategy to the truck engineering responsible for the logistics of these races. We noticed how the small little things and small little details could make a huge difference in this segment and we got fascinated by that. Before F1 we worked in other areas and in a certain moment we realized how we analyzed data from the competitions could help identify and explore opportunities in cost and time reduction and quality improvement in other sectors, specially the industry. 2 What does data analysis of a Formula 1 race can offer to the automotive industry? Is sports still the main business of QuantumBlack? What was transferred from Formula 1 to the industry, exactly? 1 3