Case study

China’s automotive industry is actively embracing the era of “software-defined vehicles”, and many car companies are introducing software talents on a large scale on the basis of electric transformation, setting up software development teams, and responding to the trend of intelligent automotive products. From the beginning of its establishment, a leading new energy vehicle company in China has noticed the importance of software for future automotive products, and has integrated “software-defined innovation” into the corporate gene.

AAI543-S50 The car enterprise is an independent new energy business segment of a traditional car enterprise in China, with an independent brand, independent team and independent management system. The company believes that the intelligent level of automotive products will become an important factor for consumers to buy cars in the future, and the car is no longer “delivery and peak”, “not broken or repaired”, but should have a rich user experience, diversified functions, and be able to “often new” and “thousands of thousands of faces”. Behind this means that software development capabilities will become the core competitiveness of car companies, and the focus of car companies’ research and development should be shifted from hardware to hardware and software.

Therefore, the car company has implemented a series of initiatives to comprehensively promote the transformation of “software driven innovation”.

First of all, it is the architecture innovation: the enterprise has developed a new EEA(electronic and electrical architecture) architecture, hardware to adapt to the structural characteristics of new energy vehicles, and the integration of ECU, which helps to upgrade the computing power, software development and update;

AAI543-S50

Secondly, process innovation: While meeting traditional standards such as ASPICE and ISO 26262 and industry compliance requirements, agile development ideas are introduced to form a hybrid development process of “waterfall + Agile” to support the development and iteration of intelligent cockpit and intelligent driving business.

Finally, tool innovation: Build CI/CD platform by introducing a series of tool chain software to improve the efficiency of software development, testing and release; PTC new generation ALM platform is introduced to realize the visual traceability management of the whole process of software development and effectively guarantee the quality of software development.

AAI543-S50 After continuous exploration and practice, the company’s transformation road has been recognized by the market and positive evaluation, brand sales are in the leading level of the new energy market, the intelligent configuration of models is rich, and the user reputation is outstanding. “Software defined car” change is a long run, enterprises have won the start, but in order to run faster, run further, will continue to firmly invest, adhere to the “software driven innovation” transformation journey.

Closing remarks

Over the past five years, McKinsey has conducted a statistical analysis of more than 20 companies that have undergone agile innovation transformation and found that public companies in industries such as automotive, consumer electronics, industrial engineering, and medical devices have achieved at least a 20% improvement in performance across a range of R&D metrics, including time to market, quality, productivity, and employee satisfaction. In some cases, time to market and productivity improved by 60%. We predict that in the next 5-10 years, agile transformation will become a new wave to promote the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry.