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Automotive engineering trends 2012: innovation, collaboration, performance

Automotive engineering trends 2012: innovation, collaboration, performance

Technology News |
By eeNews Europe



In 2012 business will further grow across all industries. But the clouds on the horizon are visible and during the first months of the year did not disappear. The economic climate remains fragile with clear investment push across industries but at the same time remaining careful and flexible to mitigate potential reduction of sales. A senior EE R&D manager of a leading automotive tier 1 supplier summarized it as follows: “Cars sell in quantities we have never seen. Markets around the world are keen to get latest technology with their cars such as energy efficiency, functional safety or internet access. But we have learned our lessons from the recent recession and made engineering and production flexible to immediately react if sales drop.”

Needs for more efficiency and competitiveness in product development are therefore obvious. Vector Consulting Services had done their annual survey across industries like automotive, aerospace, and industrial automation. The result: Companies invest in growth through innovation by developing new products and solutions. At the same time they are aware of the volatile market situation and thus challenge their development teams worldwide to be as lean and efficient as possible.

Companies and entire industries are changing very fast at this time. Hardly any year has changed our lives with technological breakthroughs as strong as the last twelve months have done. With the explosion in Fukushima, the energy change has been started in an unprecedented push of industry and politics. The high-speed train accident in China emphasized that functional safety and quality must be uncompromised. Space Shuttle had its last flight and showed us that the complexity of technical systems must remain both technically and economically manageable. The first electric cars came into series production and showed the feasibility of entirely new powertrain technologies. Smartphones already make half of all cell phone sales. This all is the basis for many innovations in mobility, which will continue to thrive in 2012.

Companies that stagnate in this period of change and growth will fail. To operate fast, effective and yet flexible in 2012 is therefore the clear priority. However, executives are unsure whether the measures taken are sufficiently sustainable, and how the rising pressure for innovation can be managed. They expect concrete proposals, to both reduce development and product cost and to set the right priorities for new development.

Here are five key trends for product development together with our concrete recommendations.

1. Successfully innovate

The ability to implement innovations successfully in a short timeframe, is the key competitive factor. Innovations are new products and improved processes, but also new basic technologies, such as we face in electric cars, in communications networks, or with the intelligent usage of energy. This constantly creates new products and solutions on which the company’s success depends as well as product safety. Inadequate roadmapping, complexity overheads and cost savings in the wrong places to the experience of Vector Consulting Services mean that a significant proportion of expenditures on research and development (R&D) are not delivering successful innovations. In the automotive industry about 40 percent of R&D budget is bad investment in products that won’t reach the market or will not be accepted by the customer. Customers in various industries complain about long cycle times from idea to market. Often, the optimal window to enter a market is missed. This is an enormous savings potential that can be raised effectively. It is not a high number of features that is crucial to success, but the few that highlight your product and makes it distinguishable from others.

Recommendation: Apply creativity methods to elaborate the few but important requirements that make your product successful. Identify few key requirements that could be game changing, such as security in automotive EE. Use benchmarks and learn from the methods used by other companies. Implement systematic innovation processes with clear yet short idea funnels, quick decision-making and fast solution development.

2. Use model-based development

Without consistent model-based methods and adequate tools support your engineering will be in deep problems within two or three years. Increasingly complex requirements must be developed efficiently and with high quality throughout from system engineering to components. Working at a higher level of abstraction and automation will improve productivity and quality. Model-based development will play a crucial role in this evolution. The companies asked by Vector Consulting Services share the same goals: Mastering complexity, improve product quality, shorten development time, and plan functions in different variations and versions for better reuse. The biggest challenges they see are their own learning curves and to keep consistency across features and products. Systems engineering still is undervalued and too often decoupled from application development. Roadmaps are maintained only for subsystems, and thus create variants with an overwhelming complexity. The business case is clear: With a degree of 30% for modeling, error rates and development costs are reduced significantly.

Recommendation: First ensure consistency of features and products with a strong systems engineering. Support the interfaces to the various components and processes through traceability, automatic consistency checks and test automation. Introduce model-based development intelligently: Step By Step introduction, focus on critical components, continuity of requirements to code and test cases, and improving your own processes in parallel. Measure the implementation, and try in each project ten to twenty percentage points improvement, at the spots where you want to put accents in 2012, for example 20% less cost variations, or 10% less cost in the test. Specifically in automotive EE we see huge benefits from a single data backbone for consistent requirements, specs and models across all changes.

3. Foster tool-supported collaboration

Increasingly distributed development teams require new forms of collaboration between teams, projects and people. The variety of networking components, applications, devices are driving completely new tool architectures and methods. Therefore, the importance of collaborative solutions for distributed and integrated life cycle management is growing. The potential benefit is tangible, as our customers emphasize: Improved multi-site collaboration with less delivery risks, better version management and transparent workflows are the most frequently mentioned advantages. About 70 percent of the companies asked by Vector Consulting Services want to improve their tools landscapes this year, but only 20 percent are satisfied with the results achieved so far. Unprofessional change management makes tools introduction fail in many companies. To our experience today mainly documents are adequately managed, while redundancy and complex processes with inadequate tools still hinder distributed project and teams. Experiences of Vector Consulting Services show that the wheel is reinvented too many times. "Earned Value", value stream mapping and Scrum are proven techniques that you should not reinvent in-house at a high cost and time.

Recommendation: Check your projects and collaboration processes: Where are the friction points, what discourages teams, which work products receive too much rework? In automotive EE we see many overheads at the interface between engineering teams on both supply sides. Try to collaborate and share specs and models intelligently. During the past year many new tools appeared for improved collaboration across the firewalls. Streamline workflows and related tools stepwise, with an overarching strategy, incremental improvement goals and a future-proof architecture. Note that efficient and effective tools solutions demand well-trained engineers and capable processes. Use professional change management, as it is not your own core competence.

4. Consistently address quality

Our customers agree in one point across industries and countries: Quality is vital to the domestic industry to survive with world-wide competition. The competition from low-cost countries is growing and often with insufficient quality. Who is getting into a mere price war at the expense of quality will disappear from the market. Across industries, demands are growing for reliability, availability, usability and information security. This implies consistently implementing quality measures across the life-cycle and demonstrating compliance with norms and standards. Which measures are at the same time effective and efficient? How can standards such as the new safety norm ISO 26262 be implemented in a lean way? Many companies still lack basic competences such as professional requirements and project management, which is a big risk considering demands on product liability. At the same time we face cost savings potentials for most customers in quality control and assurance from five to ten percent of development costs, for example with more consistency throughout the life-cycle and a systematic test strategy.

Recommendation: Specify testable quality requirements and the associated measures for their implementation and validation with an end-to-end systems perspective, before specifying individual functions. Be careful when introducing agile methods that they do not endanger your achieved quality culture. Ensure a high level of discipline in the implementation by making the project progress more transparent. Reduce the overheads of overlapping validation steps.

5. Improve your own performance
Energy efficiency, platforms like AUTOSAR, IP based car networking, new electric powertrain concepts and global standards like the ISO 26262 are the main drivers of innovation and change. Software-intensive systems as used in automobiles, aircraft, medical, transportation, utilities and industrial automation deliver today 50-70 percent of the value of these solutions, and this will further grow. The products and solutions must meet increasing quality requirements, but must be developed cost-efficiently, should be easily adaptable to new environments and must effectively exploit the advantages of modern technologies. At the same time new competitors are pushing new solutions on the market, and the technology landscape is increasingly cluttered. With these many innovations specifically in automotive EE it is key that you as a practitioner in the field continuously sharpen your saw. Your competences are what matters in the long run. Improve them in line with above trends.

Recommendation: Set for yourself specific improvement targets on a quarterly basis. Commit your own action plan – aligned of course with your company targets. Balance hard and soft targets, such as better negotiation skills and technical proficiency in modeling and security. Ask a good friend or colleague, maybe your manager if relationship is well, to serve as a mentor and to remind you on your commitments. Practice, specifically on the soft side by taking challenging assignments – inside and outside your work place. Measure results and progress. Get visibility and improve your networks by writing for blogs and journals such as eeNews Europe.

About the author:

Dr. Christof Ebert is managing director at Vector Consulting Services. He supports clients around the world to improve product strategy and product development and to manage organizational changes. Prior to that, he held global management positions for fifteen years at Alcatel-Lucent. Dr. Ebert serves on a number of advisory and industry bodies. An internationally renowned keynote speaker, he teaches at the University of Stuttgart and authored several books including his most recent book “Global Software and IT” published by Wiley.

Contact him at christof.ebert@vector.com

Vector Consulting Services GmbH
Ingersheimer Str. 24
70499 Stuttgart
Germany
www.vector.com/consulting 

 

 

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