ME: How critical is speeding up the nuts-and-bolts pro-
cess of product development? What issues are most diffi cult for product development teams? Krueger: From a business point of view, this has become a key piece of competitive advantage. As products become more sophisticat- ed and intelligent, and as the product line grows, the complexity and over- head of what engineers do each day with conventional approaches is really overwhelming engineering teams. They are always struggling to keep up, with much less time to innovate. This is putting a damper on overall business innovation, and companies’ ability to get products to market faster, and to produce better, higher-quality prod- ucts than their competitors. We see over and over again that when organizations adopt a feature-based PLE approach and execute it well, they gain a signifi cant com- petitive advantage, where they take control of leadership in their industry sector. ME: How does PLE help manufac-
turers in the automotive and transporta- tion industry? Krueger: These industry segments
represent the most advanced examples of the complexity challenges that are addressed by PLE. For example, the amount of diversity that needs to be supported across an automotive manu- facturer’s portfolio is extremely large. These are safety-critical products, so defect rates have to be kept very low. As engineers become overwhelmed by this complexity, they are more likely to make errors, so the need for quality management is especially critical. The rate of change in the automo- tive industry is very rapid as well. Every year, there’s a refresh to the various models in the manufacturer’s line, so product offerings are constantly moving at least at a one-year cadence, and sometimes every six months or less.
There’s also an extreme amount of competitiveness in these segments, so the margins are really quite small. Any unnecessary overhead that comes from the engineering process, anything that slows time-to-market, can impact
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February 2017 |
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