Software: Driving Innovation for Engineered Products
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Software: Driving Innovation Software: Driving Innovation for Engineered Products Software in products holds the key to innovations that improve quality, safety, and ease-of-use, as well as add new functions. Software simply makes products smarter. Page: 1

Software: Driving Innovation Introduction You may not realize it, but many of the “bells and whistles” in the products that you engage with on a daily basis — from cell phones to automobiles — are actually powered by software. The vast array of features including the advanced electronics in your vehicle — as well as many of the special capabilities in televisions, toys and household appliances — are innovations that have been made possible by software. Software in products holds the key to innovations that improve quality, safety, and ease-of-use, as well as add new functions. Software...

Software: Driving Innovation Chapter 1: The Challenges of Software Innovation Software represents a huge opportunity for innovation and competitive differentiation. But for discrete manufacturers, a shift in focus from hardware to software also presents many challenges. First of all, it is a completely new and different way of developing products and bringing them to market. Instead of a well understood, physical process, software development is empirical, requiring a highly iterative and collaborative approach. This makes it difficult to determine the state of release readiness because you...

Software: Driving Innovation Chapter 2: Current Software Engineering Solutions Many of the solutions available on the market today are not designed to address the complexity of embedded software development. In an effort to save money, some engineering organizations piece together solutions using Microsoft Office (e.g., spreadsheet, word documents, etc.) and Open Source solutions. These are grown organically as needs arise and result in a set of disconnected processes and products. Engineering resources are assigned to build, maintain and integrate these homegrown solutions, costing the...

Software: Driving Innovation Chapter 3: A New Approach is Needed How can companies overcome these challenges to create a development environment that supports innovation and collaboration and ensures quality and efficiency? One way to address this problem is by improving the software development process. Organizations must integrate software development with hardware development, adopting industry specific best practices across the product development lifecycle — and extend those best practices to partners and external suppliers of product components. Once the process is understood, a...

Software: Driving Innovation Chapter 4: Accelerating Innovation in Action The best way to ensure that a product development solution is comprehensive and integrated is to adopt a single product to manage core engineering artifacts across the product development lifecycle. Rather than cobbling together several different technologies, the solution should manage all aspects of product engineering including requirements management, configuration management, test management, defect tracking, change management and reporting. This built-in integration between disciplines: Pre-defined views can...

Software: Driving Innovation With a single solution that is automated from end-to-end, software development challenges become opportunities. For example: • Requirements, test plans, and software code shared among multiple products are easily reused, and efficiencies can be realized — accelerating development schedules • Changes and bug fixes can be easily propagated to all models affected by a change, improving software quality • Traceability of requirements through the development cycle eases compliance management and reporting • A flexible, open architecture links engineering development...

Software: Driving Innovation A leading medical device company has reduced compliance reporting efforts by 99% — from up to 36 man — weeks per FDA regulatory submission to mere minutes, speeding time to market and improving safety in product engineering. A pioneer in unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance was able to move from Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI, a software engineering process improvement approach designed to help organizations improve performance) Level 1 (i.e., unpredictable, reactive processes) to Level 3 (i.e.,...

Software: Driving Innovation PTC Integrity accelerates innovation of software-intensive products by connecting people, processes, and artifacts throughout the software and systems lifecycle. PTC Integrity has an open architecture that integrates disparate tools into a streamlined engineering process, allowing orchestration of engineering change and collaboration across the technology supply chain. With PTC Integrity, engineering teams improve productivity and quality, streamline compliance, and gain complete product visibility, which ultimately drive more innovative products into the...