Tight and competitive market situations pose a serious challenge to enterprises in the manufacturing industry domain. Competing in the use of data analytics to enhance products and processes requires additional resources to deal with the complexity. On the contrary, the possibilities afforded by digitization and data analysis-based approaches make for a valuable asset. In this paper we suggest a guideline to a systematic course of action for the data-based creation of holistic insight. Building an overlaying corpus of knowledge accelerates the learning curve within specific projects as well as across projects by exceeding the project-specific view towards an integrated approach.