IBM
and Robert Bosch GmbH announced a collaborative partnership to create a new,
data-driven model to more efficiently and accurately develop intelligent,
interconnected automotive products. According to a company statement, built on
open standards and IBM design tools, the continuous engineering software
platform can quickly scale to thousands of partners, clients, engineers and
technicians. By engaging all relevant stakeholders in the automotive supply
chain and elevating the right data from them, the standards-based platform will
cornerstone Bosch's long term vision for cross-industry collaboration to
quickly deliver increasingly smarter and safer vehicles.
Driven
by innovation in consumer electronics technology, the automotive sector is
under immense evolutionary pressure. Today's vehicles are more connected than
ever – containing as many as 100 computerised controllers and 10 million lines
of software code. As vehicle complexity continues to rise, automotive suppliers
must address pressures to reduce costs and to innovate quickly, while also
managing the intense challenge of ensuring vehicle quality.
Bosch
recognised this need for standards-based integration between all engineering
teams and organizations in the supply chain. Additionally, an emerging
generation of software engineers is increasingly demanding more transparent
communication, flexibility and collaboration across the industry. By unlocking
core engineering processes across teams and development partners, the IBM
platform enables Bosch to achieve a key of efficient engineering by
establishing a strategic, transparent reuse approach.
“Our
aim is greater agility, accelerating product innovation and delivery,"
said Dirk Hoheisel, Board Member at Robert Bosch GmbH, adding, “By implementing
a software and systems design platform founded on integration and reuse, we're
able to improve our integration and increase development quality – setting
higher safety and quality standards not only for our company, but for the
industry as a whole.”
The
IBM solution was selected for its ability to easily scale and become adopted by
multiple disciplines and organisations across the company. Through this
advantage, Bosch is able to execute its long term initiative of a standards-based
platform for end-to-end efficiency and strategic reuse of engineering
artifacts. As a result, the company will easily meet safety and maturity
standards such as ISO26262, ASPICE, AUTOSAR and others as they continue to
evolve.
"Strategic
reuse and the ability to unlock engineering knowledge are core components of
what IBM has coined 'Continuous Engineering'," said Kristof Kloeckner,
General Manager of IBM Rational Software. "Through process advisory and
automation, our design and development tools allow our automotive clients, such
as Robert Bosch GmbH, to streamline product creation and eliminate deployment
hurdles – enabling them to be more competitive and agile by focusing on
innovation. By building our platforms on open standards, our clients can
subsequently scale such tools broadly and rapidly, establishing a standard and
common thread to work as one global team,” he added.
Bosch's
engineering platform is founded upon Continuous Engineering principles and
built on IBM's technology for systems and software engineering. This includes
IBM Rational solutions covering Requirement, Design and Quality Management,
Collaboration and Engineering Lifecycle Management.
Source: Bosch, IBM