Global Leading Automotive Manufacturer Revs Up Innovation and Speed of Delivery Through Automated Synchronization

The technological arm of one of the world’s largest automotive manufacturing companies holds a central position in the firm's ambitious digital transformation strategy. As a key component of its Agile evolution, the manufacturer is actively crafting a global technology platform that will serve as the software foundation for all its product lines.

To support the rapid pace of innovation, the automotive manufacturer needed a way to seamlessly integrate their software toolchain. The solution needed to enable faster data synchronization, traceability, and data accuracy.

The automotive manufacturer made the strategic decision to implement Planview ® Hub as their chosen integration solution to effectively manage and synchronize software artifacts across their new software delivery toolchain. Planview Hub was selected for its unparalleled performance, scalability, and easy-to-use interface.

With the support of Planview’s customer success team, the company was able to quickly create integrations between its existing toolsets, specifically Codebeamer and Jira, and Codebeamer and Azure DevOps.

The new toolchain is now being adopted throughout other areas of the company. This expansion is expected to yield significant efficiency improvements, estimated in the tens of millions of dollars, while also enhancing time to market and maintaining a competitive edge for future vehicles.

The automotive industry is facing a combination of economic pressures, supply chain disruption, and technological advances in electric vehicles and autonomous driving. Societal changes like attitudes toward car ownership and user experience are leading to massive market shifts in customer demands and expectations.

In order to accelerate innovation and digital transformation, the company required enhanced integrated tools for its software delivery teams. These tools needed to accommodate unique legal and compliance obligations in the areas of autonomous driving and driving assistant functionalities.

At the time, the existing tools were non user-friendly and failed to support the adoption of Agile working methods while fulfilling the rigorous requirements. The manual synchronization of data between tools was not only time-consuming and error-prone for systems engineers, but it also resulted in poor data fidelity.

After the company chose to adopt Codebeamer as its standard requirement management and test specification tool, they realized they needed an integration solution to incorporate data from the other tools where work was being performed across the company (i.e., Jira and Azure DevOps).

The integration with work management tools needed to maintain regulatory compliance while still providing the speed, efficiency, quality, data fidelity, and traceability required to to meet the rate of software delivery required by the organization.

The company selected Planview Hub to integrate and synchronize the flow of software artifacts across their new software delivery toolchain. With its wide range of supported tools, Planview Hub was able to integrate with the tools they already used (Codebeamer, Jira, and Azure DevOps) and those connectors operated reliably, quickly, and consistently.

Planview Hub’s user interface was significantly easier to navigate and use compared to their existing solution, and the team liked the depth of visibility the tool provided into their systems.

Systems engineers no longer needed to switch between tools throughout the day, saving them hours each day on manual integrations – not to mention the relief of meeting regulatory requirements through automatic, reliable traceability.

Following the successful implementation of Planview Hub, the automotive manufacturer made the strategic decision to expand the solution across its other divisions.

The application of the new integrated toolchain across teams is expected to deliver tens of millions of dollars in savings from efficiency improvements, as well as accelerate time to market and deliver a competitive edge for the next generation of vehicles.

Synchronization between tools that took up to four weeks before is now achieved in a matter of hours. Project artifacts are migrated faster and easier than ever before. The company successfully synchronizes data between Jira and Codebeamer within 24 hours and has completely eliminated manual data entry.

With the time saved and the enhanced useability and visibility, Planview Hub has saved the company invaluable time and effort that can now be refocused on delivering innovative software, faster.

Recognizing the remarkable achievements so far, the company is enabling the team to undertake the migration of the entire software organization to Codebeamer through the implementation of Planview Hub.

In a global, distributed organization like this leading automotive manufacturer, making a significant change to the software toolchain is a complex, multi-year process. It’s important to ensure that all requirements are met throughout this transition – both existing requirements and new requirements as they emerge.

The company’s partnership with Planview is still in its early stages and there is ample potential to accelerate it further.