Avoiding €2B SOP risk at a leading multi-brand OEM

European Multi-Brand Auto OEM ensured planned SOP and time-to-market, while saving >€20m of costs

Challenge

A European multi-brand automotive OEM was facing high pressure to deliver a new vehicle generation on time and within budget. Previous vehicle projects have experienced delayed SOPs and beyond planned budgets. Additionally, the competitive pressure is increasing, especially from new Chinese EV-competitors.  

Engineering teams were held back by fragmented product data in various siloed systems. Manual coordination and alignment across domains caused delays and inconsistent visibility into the architecture and product maturity. This blocked a comprehensive transparency on the interdependencies between components, functions and signals. 

The lack of transparency slowed development and put pressure on milestone schedules. Because teams couldn’t see how a change in one component rippled across other components and functions, unexpected errors and late-stage integration issues kept surfacing. Understanding those faults and fixing them became a lengthy, intricate search. A single ticket could sit unresolved for weeks, stalling overall progress. 

There was no unified and automated dashboard for tracking functional maturity and the associated issues. Instead, teams relied on static manual reports, spreadsheets, and fragmented updates – making it nearly impossible to assess progress in real time and with fully transparency. Risks were often discovered too late and accumulated as SOP approached, leaving little room to respond efficiently. 

Approach

To regain control over SOP delivery, accelerate development and bring transparency to its complex development environment, the OEM introduced SPREAD’s Engineering Intelligence Platform as a central layer within an existing cross-functional SOP taskforce. The goal was to enable fact-based steering, faster decision-making, and earlier detection and resolution of issues – without needing to replace existing tools or workflows. 

The deployment began with a 1-month setup phase, during which SPREAD ingested and connected data from multiple systems, including test traces, issue tickets, release plans, E/E architecture, functional models, and various unstructured documents. This laid the foundation for a functional Product Twin that reflected complex vehicle system across domains. 

Following setup, the rollout progressed in a 3-month phased approach, gradually onboarding key user groups across R&D, product line management and product management. Each team gained access to tailored insights into functional maturity, architectural dependencies, and issue traceability – integrated into their daily workflows without requiring tool replacements.  

The following SPREAD solutions were deployed: 

• Product Explorer: Gave teams a clear view into the product architecture, allowing deep dives into signals, functions, and component relationships and their interdependencies.
• E/E Inspector: Connected traces and signal behavior to their architectural root causes, accelerating error identification and resolution during testing
• Action Tower: Delivered interactive dashboards showing functional maturity, associated tickets and progress toward release milestones – Deep-dives into individual issues and blockers are made possible within one tool
  

Impact 

SPREAD’s solutions directly and quickly translated into concrete business results for the new vehicle project:  

• >€20m saving: Transparent architecture interdependencies avoided unexpected errors and reduced associated delays.  

• 60% faster issue resolution: Guided troubleshooting with clear view of architectural relationships reduced steps and time spent on search and resolution of errors. 

• €2bn risk mitigation: Transparency on vehicle maturity kept the project on plan and its original SOP data, avoiding costly delays. 

“Working with SPREAD enables me and my reports to steer our vehicle projects based on facts and it helps our engineers in IVV to identify root causes of EE & SW issues faster than ever before. Today’s complex vehicles lead to high risks in SOP date prediction. This is why SPREAD realizes us savings of an eight-figure amount per year.”
— SVP of new product line