Engineering a car is challenging. Engineering a safe, autonomous car is exponentially more difficult. As products become more connected, the engineering becomes more complex. For example, medical devices now have millions of lines of embedded software code. Aircraft manufacturers need to comply with complex safety standards designed to protect the lives of pilots and passengers. Think about how many of the items in our daily lives have become modern day marvels of engineering. These complex products require a modern-day approach to engineering lifecycle management, a way to balance both the need for speed to market and safety, and a way to deliver it at scale.
Complexity is Increasing
Nobody understands the need for balance better than the product development teams that are tasked with managing the rising levels of complexity in today’s complex products. Designing and developing software-driven products requires processes that are capable of scaling the systems that deliver the systems. Decisions must be made in the midst of ever-expanding levels of supplier collaboration. Real-time collaboration is often happening among teams in different time zones who may speak different languages. So, amid all this complexity, what’s the secret to successfully navigating today’s engineering environment? It starts with finding a single source of truth across engineering data, a beacon that teams can follow to provide access and traceability throughout the product lifecycle. It starts with an end-to-end engineering lifecycle management solution designed to operate at enterprise scale.
IBM has been helping companies and their product engineers address their toughest challenges. We’ve partnered with our clients to help them to build the most complex assets on the planet; cars, planes, electronics, medical devices and more. As complexity increases, IBM has now made our Engineering Lifecycle Management solution even smarter. The newest enhancements to IBM’s Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) solution harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to help design, build and scale with the precision our world class customers demand. Recently, IBM Engineering launched Requirements Quality Assistant (RQA) with Watson to help engineering teams improve the quality of their requirements, minimize risk and improve time to market – while they’re being written. And now, RQA will be available for both DOORS and DOORS Next customers.
Please comply
In industries with increasingly stringent compliance regulations, getting the products built isn’t enough. Through our work across some of the most highly regulated industries, we’ve seen firsthand how challenging making an excellent – and compliant – product can be. This is why we’ve been collaborating with industry experts and partners to make adherence a more frictionless experience. We started by integrating support for the automotive industry process standard, ASPICE, into our ELM solution. By providing a predefined process with easy-to-deploy project templates and reports, customers can now engineer with peace of mind. It’s part of our commitment to offer market leading ELM solutions that closely align processes with compliance regulations.
Insightful engineering – at enterprise scale
Engineering teams are at a tipping point in how they develop increasingly complex products. The integration of hardware, software, and ubiquitous connectivity has created a wealth of opportunities that seed innovation. But it also brings its share of challenges. Companies have already recognized the limits of manual or siloed development processes. That is why we have focused on building solutions that establish an end-to-end, integrated development process that combines AI, analytics and digital transformation, and it’s available today with IBM’s updated ELM capabilities.
Continental gains transformational traction
At a recent event, Dr. Bernhard Rieger, PMT Head and Head of Quality and Processes at Continental’s Chassis & Safety division, said,
“The shift towards autonomous, connected, electrified, and shared vehicles has a major impact on our business. In order to meet these changing requirements, we are working with IBM to reinvent the way we develop and deploy products.”
Dr. Rieger and his team in the Chassis & Safety Division of Continental leverage IBM’s ELM solution to further advance the development of smart, connected vehicles by helping its engineers to collaborate and share data across teams. This improves workflow to develop and track products in real time over their entire lifecycle. Continental leverages these capabilities to cover the development cycle for systems and software, including modeling and simulation, as well as requirements, quality and configuration management. Personally, I look forward to our partnership and seeing the progress and innovation that arises out of this smarter way of working.
IBM’s Role in the Future of Complex Engineering
Bringing data-driven insights closer to the engineering teams is critical to driving the future of product engineering. Across the end-to-end engineering lifecycle, the compliance standards that keep us safe, and the digital twins and digital threads emerging from this data awakening, we at IBM have set our sights beyond the current tipping point. We want to ensure our customers are equipped with the tools they need to develop tomorrow’s products in a smarter, safer and more inspiring way, at enterprise scale.
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