Nio Inc. Optimizes Efficiency and Accelerates Smart Electric Vehicle Time-to-Market Through Value Stream Integration with Hub

NIO Inc. (NYSE: NIO) is a pioneer and leading manufacturer of premium smart electric vehicles in China. NIO designs, develops, jointly manufactures and sells high-end electric vehicles, while driving innovations in next-generation technologies in autonomous driving, digital technologies, electric powertrains and batteries.

NIO differentiates itself through its continuous technological breakthroughs and innovations, such as its industry-leading battery swapping technologies, Battery as a Service, as well as its proprietary autonomous driving technologies and Autonomous Driving as a Service.

With demand for electric vehicles in China surging (boosted by the country’s national subsidy policy for new energy vehicles), NIO began using Planview Hub to improve efficiency across all its R&D processes.

• Achieved faster delivery times
• Automated traceability for compliance
• Error-free collaboration with suppliers

In the increasingly competitive electric vehicle market, time-to-market is everything. But by its very nature, developing and manufacturing an EV involves complex R&D collaboration within the company itself and with its third party suppliers.

NIO’s commitment to premium vehicles and premium service dictates that the quality and efficiency with which they design, develop, manufacture and service its EVs is impeccable. The ability to launch new EV models and new services depends on optimized end-to-end value streams. For that very reason, NIO set out to integrate its entire software delivery supply chain, which spans multiple tools, locations, suppliers and partners.

“We wanted to remove any friction, delays and miscommunications from our processes and value streams,” says Jack Longyun Zou, Vice IT Director at NIO. “Planview has automated flow and traceability for us, correlating data from multiple systems and sources. Our technologists and business users can now view and associate relevant data, each in their respective system.”

Planview’s Value Stream Management Platform was an easy choice for NIO. With connections to 60+ Agile and DevOps tools, NIO could easily integrate its internal systems, like Jira and Polarion, as well as its suppliers.

“Planview is extremely easy to install, configure and operate, and we started seeing the return instantly. Our leadership is thrilled with the improvements to our speed, throughput and quality,” says Zou. “Moreover, we now have the flexibility to integrate additional endpoints and use cases as our enterprise toolchain and supplier landscape evolves. We’ve freed ourselves to make any necessary changes to our environment, while keeping data flowing consistently across our value streams.”

Collaboration with third party suppliers can be slow, error-prone and risky when it relies on offline communication, manual data duplication and asynchronous handovers. In addition, visibility into the health of an overall product or project can be a challenge when data is siloed and fragmented.

Planview has broken down those silos to allow NIO and its partners to work as a single well-oiled machine. Each party keeps its own tools and workflows, but the data they need is delivered directly to their systems nearly instantly. Taskstop’s Flow FabricTM makes the data exchange effortless, with simple plug-and-play connectors. A flexible and secure architecture keeps each organization’s data safe.

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