Highly efficient and compliant engineering

You want to increase the efficiency of your daily work in engineering? You need a structure for organizing processes, documents and knowledge to ensure that your work input can be found easily and intuitively? And you want to use AI efficiently and in a structured manner?

In this article we want to introduce you to our innovative web-based Engineering Process Framework (EPF). Currently, EPF gives invaluable support when it comes to keeping an eye on the requirements and processes to be fulfilled. The system enables our engineers to work in compliance with standards, norms and regulations while achieving a maximum of efficiency with a minimum of documentation effort.

What′s the challenge?

The current engineering in the automotive industry is characterized by an increasing amount of regulations and standards. On the one hand, there are legislations and norms, such as ISO26262 for functional safety and ISO21434 for cybersecurity. A strict adherence to these standards during the development of software-driven systems is absolutely mandatory. Additionally, there are maturity models, like ASPICE, whose compliance is often required. The abundance of these regulations results in significant additional efforts, particularly through evidences and documentation. Depending on the development context, the amount of standards to be adhered to can also vary. Simultaneously, ASPICE demands the definition and adherence to standard processes for the company to achieve maturity level 3. This results in the great challenge of developing standard processes that must apply to both agile and conventional development projects with varying amounts of standards and norms.

At the same time, the processes shall result in efficient project work despite the opposing high documentation requirements. This means that the input required for day-to-day work must be easy to find, the key issues has to be described in terms of processes and available as best practice, and templates must be available for common work steps to reduce the workload. An intuitive framework creates the basis for these aspects and at the same time facilitates the management of acquired knowledge and the structured use of AI for the efficient provision of knowledge and reduction of workloads. The Engineering Process Framework (EPF) developed by FEV Group achieves this balance between efficiency and documentation through its modular and variable automized design.

How is the EPF structured to meet this challenge?

The process framework is based on five pillars:

1. Pharmacy Cabinet: The idea of this feature is to structure the EPF like a pharmacy cabinet organized by drawers. Pick the processes, documents and knowledge that you need to be successful in your project from the drawers of the cabinet. AI is used to increase additionally the efficiency of daily work with EPF through automation of process steps and efficient provision of existing knowledge, by providing an intelligent chatbot.
2. Automated Configuration and Tailoring: The EPF considers several standards and is applicable to a wide range of projects. Therefore, this feature satisfies the need for the EPF to be configured for the specific needs of the selected project.
3. Automated ALM Set Up: This feature satisfies the need for a given EPF project configuration, with all connected processes, methods, templates, etc., to be translated into an ALM project repository—ready for project operation.
4. Feedback Mechanism: State-of-the-art standards, methods, tools, and the latest trends and experiences from the engineers are a core driver of a successful EPF. Therefore, this feature enables continuous improvement.
5. Processes according to basic idea of PLE: Underlying process landscape must be defined, covering all relevant (technical, technical management, and organizational) processes. These must represent 150% processes, which are automatically configured according to the development context and relevant standards.

The EPF is applied to the entire FEV Group to benefit from a global, efficient, and at the same time, standard-compliant development. Are you also facing similar challenges in engineering and you want to introduce processes in your company? We would be happy to support you in setting up your individual and most efficient process framework.

You want to find out more? Get in contact with our experts Dr.-Ing. Christian Granrath and Dr. Jan Gehrt