Digitalization of engineering processes: Seamless collaboration and innovative product development
Industry: Automotive OEM | Period: 4 years | Team size: 7 consultants
Vehicle dreams of the future are being created under the proverbial hood of our automotive OEM customers, and this requires designers, homologation experts, simulation engineers and many other roles to control a powerful and simultaneously operable system network. Relatively new automotive players on the global market are able to bring vehicles to market faster because they do not have to operate a “brownfield” (grown system landscape over time) and they have software systems that make company-wide collaboration efficient.
To achieve this, consistent data in vehicle development must be documented using continuous working methods in the Product Lifecycle Management Tool (PLM) and made quickly and intuitively usable for the various roles, even with tens of thousands of users every day. Last but not least, it is about enabling the use cases of artificial intelligence: the improved (data) networking and modernization of the system network for the product development process is the transition to the new data age.
Our customer, an automotive manufacturer, opted for the Dassault 3DExperience platform as a new component in the PLM system network. Together with an enhanced release management system as an additional component, a new and feature-rich development and collaboration platform is to be created in this way. 3DExperience at the center and in combination with many other systems will shape how designers bring vehicle visions to the road in the long term.
The central challenge is the ever-increasing virtualization in “Data Driven Product Development”. Processes from requirements to validation must be taken into account in the V-model and end-to-end data management must be established.
Our task here is to network the various levels in the project so that each sub-project can act in a targeted manner and the architecture built in this way is brought to life.
We have been supporting the engineering transformation of various parties for over four years. In 2024, a team of seven consultants accompanied the engineering transformation. 2024 was also the decisive year for setting up the release train, which will pave the way for the first productive release of the development and collaboration platform and thus enable the development of a new vehicle derivative for series production.
Challenge: Central challenges in the project
- Complex dependencies require technical detailing at an early stage: The high level of complexity in the automotive product development process (PEP), characterized by numerous stakeholders and intricate interrelationships, makes it difficult to develop comprehensive, coherent task packages. However, these are necessary in order to create a clear project plan for IT implementation. The long duration of the concept phase resulted from the fact that the overarching coherence first had to be worked out, while a lack of transparency within these processes made it difficult to gain acceptance and successfully implement the necessary changes in the new working environment.
- Comprehensive architecture is essential – collaborative cooperation is increasingly difficult: Cross-team coordination is essential, but limited cooperation and many dependencies make it difficult to merge the concepts. The business architecture must be brought to a detailed level in order to successfully launch the software project. A key challenge was to solve the conceptual gap between project teams.
- Skills in demand: Product Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Architecture Management, Requirement Engineering: Excellent skills in requirement engineering are essential for the successful development of a business architecture. These skills must be combined with the ability to comprehensively grasp the many technical facets of the product development process (PDP) and effectively integrate them into the overall concept. Knowledge of product lifecycle management and enterprise architecture management complements this profile in order to create a robust and future-proof basis for the course of the project.
- Coordination and clarification of extensive, cross-divisional specialist topics: In order to derive requirements and make progress, extensive, highly complex specialist topics and a dense network of interwoven content-related processes must first be mastered. This content represents a significant hurdle that needs to be overcome.
- Established collaboration model reaches its limits: Although the existing agile collaboration model used within the established IT matrix organization proved successful, it reached its limits when it came to managing cross-team dependencies and collaboratively solving complex tasks. Numerous open tasks and points of clarification were identified, but were difficult to assign and solve effectively within this framework.
- Employees have limited experience in project work and online technical meetings: Some project employees had limited experience in using tools such as Jira and Confluence as well as in requirements creation and quality control, which made it difficult to coordinate and merge concepts. While they are familiar with identifying work independently, they find it difficult to collaborate with other teams across a wide range of disciplines. Online meetings, in which employees from different organizational units come together, require special skills for control and documentation.
Success Journey: Mastering complexity and shaping innovation together
01
- Ability to regularly change flight altitudes ("zoom in", "zoom out")
- Development and presentation of core functionalities in an overarching context, which fulfill the new engineering system in the target image
- Use of a simplifying medium: product development process conceptualized from the perspective of the life cycle of a component from plant to release. Application of design thinking methods in large workshop series
- Supporting sub-architectures and merging them into the global context of the future vehicle development process
02
- Workshops and workshop series with a pre-defined focus and clearly defined scope, allowing sub-areas within the component journey to be conceptualized with a high level of maturity
- Ensuring the added value of workshops in terms of content, e.g. through target-oriented workshop formats and media. High quality standards in the development of knowledge (requirement engineering) and expertise in order to strengthen the interpersonal factors of collaboration.
- Empowerment of individual project teams through support that covers the overarching aspects, identifies dependencies and provides coordination for detailed elaboration.
03
- Interface between business and IT for better communication between all stakeholders by ensuring that everyone understands the big picture and coordinates their work accordingly.
- Strengthening cross-organizational cooperation - both in the established line organization and in the created project organization
- Involvement of experts, for example in the preparation of workshops
Impact at Launch: From the roadmap to successful implementation
- Thanks to our involvement in the project, the map was provided with the necessary coordinates and routes for more concrete implementation.
- The project plan was no longer simply a list of the individual teams, but was transformed into a reliable roadmap with a view to the next two years.
- The first release of the new platform was sent to the line organization for implementation.
- The overall consistency of the content could be verified and finally approved:
- Kickstart of the 13 project teams in the detailing of these core functionalities.
- Architectural artifacts such as processes and capabilities for all core functionalities as a basis for further collaboration.
- Visual representation of the architectural picture as a clearly recognizable added value of the architectural service – clear view of functionalities, interfaces and involved applications and domains for all parties.
Conclusion & outlook: From complexity to clarity - digitization as a driver of innovation
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- Experience: 20 years of expertise in digitalization & automation of production and logistics processes
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