Driving a proof of concept with Aston Martin

When we were approached by the marketing team at Aston Martin, we were all a little surprised. It is not often that the marketing department engages a tech firm. Still, the project they had us design and implement for them was very different to anything we had done for our other automotive clients.

Aston Martin wanted to bring the story of your car to each customer. This involved capturing and presenting every significant manufacturing process in a photo album bound and illustrated with each new vehicle.

Sounds simple enough, right, but we had to be sure before we could create a complete and workable project. We designed a proof of concept.

Proof of concept

A proof of concept is precisely what it says: we are proving the viability of a project to determine if the idea is worth pursuing and what might be required to bring the concept to reality.

By running a proof of concept, you:

Demonstrate if the product or service can be produced in a real-world setting.

Determine the existing or potential market for this product.

Find out if the idea works as it was predicted.

Determine if any additional technologies are necessary to create a complete project to ensure it runs as intended.

Gather feedback and learnings that can be incorporated into a final project.

Essentially, running a proof of concept can help key decision-makers decide if the idea is worth pursuing and, if so, identify any potential roadblocks before an entire development process has begun.

Steps to creating a proof of concept

Define the Objectives - for our situation, Aston Martin wanted a way to produce an album detailing the creation of every car that is built in their factory. This needed to utilise technology to ensure all customer photo albums could be created without the need to create a job or interfere with the engineering team's work on the floor.

Identify stakeholders - the obvious stakeholders are the marketing department at Aston Martin, who wanted this project created. But this project is also a selling tool; the sales team is a stakeholder, as are the customers, technical experts and the various groups that would be affected by this work.

Gather the requirements - each stakeholder has their requirements from a project. Understanding each of their needs, preferences, and expectations will help you shape the project.

Select the technologies - once you have the requirements, piecing together the technology you require to fulfil the objectives becomes simple. At this stage, you can also begin to see if the project is worth continuing with - if the technologies required outweigh the potential ROI, you either need to devise another way or shelve the project; you have proof that the concept isn't currently viable.

Plan - if your project is still viable at this point, develop a detailed plan for executing a proof of concept minimum viable product. Plan out your timelines, resource allocations, budget and assess your risks.

Design architecture - As with any project, architecture is critical to success. Detail your workflows, create the data models you require, and plan the interfaces and integrations that will be necessary.

Build your MVP - develop your MVP or prototype based on the objectives and architecture. This functional solution should address the core requirements; you can build on this later if the MVP and proof of concept work.

Test - Test the functionality of your MVP to ensure it meets the requirements set out. You can conduct manual and automated tests to address any issues or bugs in your solution.

Feedback - This is one of the most critical stages and is too often neglected. The stakeholders and end-users will tell you what you need to know to help improve the MVP towards a complete product.

Why a proof of concept is essential.

For our project with Aston Martin, our PoC highlighted a few things we just hadn't considered and couldn't know until we built out and tested a project. Some aspects were simple to fix; cameras taking so many photos needed to be upgraded to commercial-level equipment. With every step of the manufacturing process being captured, we captured more images than the lifespans of most cameras!

There were some more complicated issues that we hadn't considered in our stakeholder analysis: the engineering and floor workers felt like the photos were intrusive. An oversight that we rectified from their feedback. Rather than automating the picture capture process, a workflow element of pressing a red button has now been incorporated to ensure the employee takes pictures.

One of the most important things that came out of the PoC was the understanding that sometimes, the factory is forced into changing the running order of production. The manufacturing process will sometimes follow different orders depending on the supply chain and staffing. Our initial setup meant pictures would have gone to the wrong customer. The part photographed might have been for the car before or after. From this, we created a direct link to Aston Martin's back-end system, allowing us to automate the correct photo selection based on recorded workflows.

With these learnings, we could create an entire project that works for Aston Martin. If you are fortunate enough to be able to buy one of these incredible motors, I really hope you love the album detailing every moment of production, we think its an amazing gift for someone buying automotive history!