Imagine what it would be like to have an automotive engineering solution that combines the expertise of leading OEMs and suppliers in one step. Ensuring compliance with existing industry standards would become a by-product of best practices instead of a dedicated task. This vision is becoming a reality with the help of IBM’s Engineering Lifecycle Management solutions.
In regulated industries, companies have no choice other than to comply with established industry standards and policies. For safety-critical developments, the consequences of non-compliance range from fines and loss of reputation to imprisonment for those responsible.
Striving for compliance can also be seen as an opportunity. Industry standards such as CMMI and ASPICE define an established framework for measuring process quality. Higher process quality has been proven to lead to higher product quality and efficiency. Thus, achieving these industry standards indicates that companies can to deliver higher product quality at lower failure rates. Therefore, high ASPICE compliance is not only a differentiator, but a prerequisite for the cooperation with automotive OEMs.
The ASPICE Assessment Model extends across all processes of the V-Model. It includes requirements management, system and software architecture, software development as well as software and system tests. A central challenge is the consistent management of work products and their dependencies across different domains. In heterogeneous tool landscapes, achieving the required traceability is a common challenge. IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) is the only solution that can provide the capabilities to manage all of these work products and their traceability in one tool set.
This is both an immense opportunity and a challenge. The extensive customization of ELM products raises questions about how best to use tools that are tailored for an industry context. To answer these questions, IBM is working on a set of content and services that help companies to tailor IBM ELM as an integrated solution for their industry. Initially, IBM is focusing on the automotive industry.
IBM stands up an IBM ELM ASPICE best-practice cloud environment for automotive industry
The contents of this automotive solution address multiple topics. IBM ELM products are at the core of the solution. The compliance tailoring is derived from the ASPICE VDA assessment scope. The essential enhancements are information attributes, work items and workflows requested by the ASPICE VDA scope. Orienting the core design on this standard gives the solution its automotive DNA.
ASPICE itself, however, only defines a framework of what needs to be done and what information needs to be presented. It is up to each company to answer the question: how to do it? Therefore, IBM is also working in on an agile process model sufficient to work in an ASPICE-compliant way.
Collaboration is critical
A major challenge in creating such automotive solution is distilling only the essential content. Users already struggle with a multitude of various attributes from different departments. In order to simplify work in the tools and maintain reliable reporting, it is necessary to find a lean information model. This way, you can achieve low learning curves and a short time to value.
BLOG UPDATE October 17, 2019:
Are you interested in participating in our beta program?
IBM is working with ClearObject to establish IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM), a cloud-based engineering and best-practice environment specialized for the automotive industry. Because it’s available as software as a service (SaaS), organizations can participate and evaluate the developed concepts without dedicating their own IT resources.
The best-practice environment under development is being made available in the upcoming weeks as a closed beta. If you are interested in how IBM ELM is best used in an automotive context considering ASPICE base practices, visit the following link. You’ll learn about the closed beta program and be able to register your interest.
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