Fewer design hassles. More innovation. No wires.

But for this vision of the future to fully materialize, these vehicles will need to be truly independent, negating the need for human intervention whether on the road, in the garage or even charging overnight.

“You don’t really expect a robotic arm to reach out and plug the car in for you each time,” comments Rod Wilson, General Manager of Lumen Freedom, a manufacturer of wireless charging units for the automotive industry. “Whether private or commercial, these electric vehicles won’t be independent without a wireless charging system. And recognizing that this was where the industry was heading back in 2016, the Lumen Group decided to venture into wireless charging.”

Of course, pioneering an innovation is easier said than done. And as the business began developing and commercializing these wireless charging units, its design management efforts were only growing more complex and difficult to manage.

To support its product development efforts, Lumen Freedom chose to work with IBM Business Partner Olive Grove IT to deploy IBM® Engineering Requirements Management DOORS® Next and IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) software.

“We looked at a few different tools,” recalls Eliott. “We weighed their pros and cons, and given that DOORS Next and ELM are essentially standards in the automotive industry, we chose IBM for our preferred toolchain.” With DOORS Next as a core component of the lifecycle within ELM, Lumen Freedom can now capture, trace and analyze its mechanical, hardware and software requirements throughout the entire product development process, including any customer-specific variants.

“For a small company, they had a particularly complex challenge facing them,” adds Davyd Norris, Founder of Olive Grove IT. “And since ELM could be delivered under a SaaS [software as a service] model, they wouldn’t need to dedicate system admins to help with the tool now or in the future.”

Lumen Freedom uses the Engineering Lifecycle Management software, in turn, to establish standardized traceability across its testing, defect tracking, validation and overall workflow activities. “We’re using it daily as a Scrum board,” explains Tony Rocco, Innovation and Technology Manager at Lumen Freedom. “It keeps everyone connected and promotes a shared vision throughout the production program. We don’t have time to make mistakes or repeat things, and Engineering Lifecycle Management lets us get it right the first time.”

Wilson adds: “It’s like a management tool for the people. It breaks up what was going on inside siloed teams and allows more inclusive cross-management. So when we focus on the right arm of the V model—as we focus on the quality of our offerings—we can trace back to each requirement from each stage of the process and make sure that those are reflected in our final builds throughout the validation and verification process.”

At the same time, Olive Grove provides ongoing coaching and product expertise in Agile Systems Engineering methods to further help streamline development processes. “Our relationship with Olive Grove has worked out very well,” notes Rocco. “There was so much flexibility in the IBM software that it wasn’t immediately intuitive how we should use the tool. But Olive Grove brought in the methodology and backend support to tweak the tool to our exact requirements. We couldn’t have done this without Olive Grove.”