The need for automotive OEMs to manage product complexity in a global industry mandates a systems-driven product development process, which combines systems engineering methodology across all development domains with an integrated definition of the product. Siemens PLM Software’s collaborative decision support platform enables systems-driven automotive product development by bringing together all cross-domain knowledge into a single, logical location that is accessible to authorized users — no matter where they are in the organization or located in the world.

Key elements of this approach include:

• A consistent process framework based on systems engineering
• Configuration management
• Issue, change and schedule management
• Traceability throughout the entire lifecycle
• All built on an open foundation

By applying a consistent process framework based on systems engineering, you can capture, manage and organize information and knowledge, beginning with the voice of the customer, and continuing through to service, support and end-of-life. By modeling requirements and allocating them through functional and logical decompositions to physical implementation, you will achieve a significant level of traceability throughout the vehicle. Modeling the systems provides a thorough understanding of the dependencies within the model, and helps to drive alignment and enable traceability between engineering domains such as materials, body, chassis, exterior, interior, powertrain, electrical/electronics and software integration.

It is critical to the success of an automotive OEM to unite the different product bills of material (BOMs) and bills of process (BOPs), and even more importantly, to align the semantics of these different views, such as usage versus product structure. Once those alignments have been built, this information backbone makes it possible to drive integrated processes, such as configuration and change management from end-to-end.

The Siemens PLM Software solution is built on open standards to allow for integration between our applications, as well as with legacy data and systems and other third party applications. This gives you the flexibility to implement the business process you require, even as you take advantage of the best applications, and aggregate work from diverse authoring environments and authors. Throughout the entire process, everyone will be working with a single source of information.

Siemens PLM Software’s systems-driven automotive product development solutions provide you with:

• Traceability of voice of the customer throughout the development process to align decisions with product strategic intent that delivers the product that customers want
• Reduced rework through continuous analysis and validation of the vehicle, system or component performance to objectives
• Reduced time and cost for the entire design-to-manufacturing process for composites
• End-to-end integration ensuring that everyone across all vehicle domains can get the right information when they need it to create a product that best meets customer requirements

The result of smarter decisions? Better products.