AI and Compliance Offerings Power Insightful Engineering at Enterprise Scale
Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) helps keep engineering projects on point and helps manage the complex assets involved in large projects. IBM is one of the major players in this space. I spoke with Dibbe Edwards, Vice President of IBM Watson IoT Continuous Engineering Offering Manager and Delivery, about IBM’s continuous engineering and DevOps strategies.
Wong: IBM just had an ELM announcement. Can you tell me more about it?
Edwards: We have made our Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) solution even smarter. As we continue to help companies address their toughest engineering challenges, we’ve continuously partnered with clients to help them build the most complex assets on the planet—cars, planes, electronics, medical devices and more. The complexity of building these intelligent, software-driven assets continues to increase, and our continuous enhancements to IBM’s ELM solution allows clients to design, build and scale with the precision their customers demand.
IBM Engineering is launching Requirements Quality Assistant (RQA) with Watson for IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS to help engineering teams improve the quality of their requirements, minimize risk and improve time to market – while they’re being written—by using the power of artificial intelligence to evaluate requirements against industry standards. After all, a product is only as strong as its requirements that drive them. Now RQA will be available for both DOORS and DOORS Next customers.
IBM Engineering is also introducing a new IBM ELM Automotive Compliance offering that will assist our automotive industry clients streamline their adoption of the Automotive Software Performance Improvement and Capability Determination (ASPICE) compliance standard. ASPICE is being endorsed across automotive OEM’s as a standard to ensure high quality engineering development process across the industry’s expansive partner ecosystem.
Wong: What is “Insightful engineering at enterprise scale?”
Edwards: Insightful engineering provides the ability for development teams to leverage engineering data, processes, interdependencies, data transparency, traceability, and analysis. This helps teams garner deeper insights that will lead to better decision making and optimization, increased productivity, and better product quality.
Companies are recognizing the limits of siloed development processes, so that’s why we’ve focused on building solutions that establish an end-to-end, integrated, development processes that leverages AI, analytics and data transparency to help enable digital transformation of engineering.
Enterprise scale enables development teams to manage the development of the most complex systems and software, even across geo-dispersed teams, broad supplier networks, systems-of-systems designs, increasingly regulated industries, and safety-critical systems where failure is not an option. It’s not about the size of your company, it is about the complexity of the product you are designing and developing.
Wong: Can you tell me a bit more about how IBM ELM supports engineering teams?
Edwards: IBM ELM is an end-to-end, integrated systems and software development solution for complex development management. It empowers engineers and their teams to more easily manage each stage of the engineering lifecycle. The direct linkage of systems with electrical/electronics and software is the nexus of complexity in modern product engineering. Clients building these complex products are adopting ELM and transforming their engineering processes using MBSE along with agile practices to help them manage this complexity while operating with speed and quality.
ELM enables teams to employ AI, advanced analytics, and digital twin/digital thread to reveal previously unattainable insights that improve product quality and model the impact of changes made in the development cycle. Our solution offers exclusive capabilities that allow teams to scale across multi-variant designs, systems-of-systems, geo-dispersed teams and supplier networks, all while managing compliance and regulatory requirements—to ultimately deliver products at greater speed, lower cost, and higher quality.
Wong: So, why is electronic design becoming increasingly complex and can you provide some examples?
Edwards: The short answer is because of the increasing complexity of software enabled connected products. Today, electronic design engineers incorporate hardware, software and connectivity into systems, but they also have to design for data. Designing connected products that are active, autonomous, and constantly sharing information—upstream and downstream—has become essential. Let me give you three examples of this growing complexity in key industries:
- Auto: Autonomous vehicles are anticipated to have hundreds of millions of lines of code running within and across a variety of electronic subsystems (i.e. infotainment, collision avoidance, image-recognition), increasing the complexity of the automobile exponentially. ELM solution can help engineering teams increase the speed of product development without sacrificing quality or standards, and ultimately delivering engaging driver experiences that their customers will love.
- Medical: Designing and developing medical devices (operating robots, testing and monitoring devices) is extremely challenging with growing regulatory oversight and increasing concerns on the high costs across the medical industry. ELM helps to achieve real-time transparency, reduce the cost of compliance, and ultimately innovate and deliver zero fault products in a safety critical environment.
- Aerospace & Defense: Aircraft companies are designing and developing very complex systems-of-systems (relying more on electronics to fly and operate aircraft) across a vast ecosystem of suppliers, while regulatory oversight and the need for fail-safe products makes development traceability, auditability, reporting, and compliance mandatory. ELM is the foundational platform for leveraging AI, analytics, and virtual modeling across the growing IoT landscape transforming the engineering lifecycle, and helping manage product complexity, the cost of compliance and reporting, and a more sophisticated supplier ecosystem.
Wong: What has been the customer reaction?
Edwards: Overwhelmingly positive. As an example, Continental is leveraging IBM’s ELM solution to further advance the development of smart, connected vehicles by helping its engineers to collaborate and share data across teams.
Dr. Bernhard Rieger, PMT Head and Head of Quality and Processes at Continental’s Chassis & Safety division recently spoke about the transformation gains: “The shift towards autonomous, connected, electrified, and shared vehicles has a major impact on our business. In order to meet these changing requirements, we are working with IBM to reinvent the way we develop and deploy products.”
IBM’s ELM improves workflow to develop and track products in real time, over their entire lifecycles. Continental leverages these capabilities to cover the development cycle for systems and software, including modeling and simulation, as well as requirements, quality and configuration management. Personally, I look forward to our partnership and seeing the progress and innovation that arises out of this smarter way of working.
Wong: What does the future look like for the industry?
Edwards: Products will continue to get more complex as they evolve, and engineering teams will be required to develop products faster, at lower cost, with better quality, and ensure a variety of compliance and regulatory requirements are met. As product lifecycles become shorter, competitive pressures will increase, and many companies will live or die on their next product introduction.
This means that companies will have to continuously innovate and adopt engineering management processes that facilitate speed, quality, and compliance so that their engineers can focus on developing the next market-winning product.
