European Defense System OEM accelerated time-to-market by 20% and increased revenue by 5%
Challenge
A leading European Defense System OEM was under growing pressure to accelerate development and ramp-up timelines while meeting the differing requirements of multiple national armies. Previous development cycles had been slow and delayed, making it difficult to respond to political urgency.
Development teams operated in silos, working with inconsistent and disconnected data across E/E architecture, requirements, components, and functional models. Because every military program came with unique specifications, platform reuse was rare, and variant complexity slowed down development efforts. Instead of building modular systems, teams managed multiple overlapping projects – each developed in isolation.
This lack of transparency on architectural interdependencies between components, functions and signals made it difficult to anticipate downstream impacts of changes and resolve development issues quickly. Even small errors could cascade, causing significant delays and ripple effects. Troubleshooting was slow, with engineers spending significant time manually investigating fault origins across different data sources.
At the same time, onboarding for end users happened only after the physical delivery. Without early access to digital training materials, operational ramp-up was delayed, impacting readiness in the field. Once errors occurred in the field, end users and technicians often struggled with repairing issues quickly, leading to critical downtimes. They had to sort through physical manuals and documents, and call for engineering help, to resolve errors.
Approach
To accelerate delivery and manage variant complexity across different military requirements, the European Defense System OEM introduced SPREAD’s Engineering Intelligence Platform as a secure, on-premise solution. The objective was to unify architecture understanding, streamline requirement handling, and enable early onboarding and guided troubleshooting in the field – all without replacing existing systems or workflows.
The deployment began with a two-month setup and data ingestion phase. During this time, SPREAD integrated information from E/E architectures, system requirements, components, CAD files, functional models, and unstructured documents. This laid the foundation for a unified Product Twin reflecting cross-domain system logic and dependencies.
Over the following three months, the rollout extended to engineering, production, and field teams. Each group gained access to role-specific insights embedded into their workflows – improving transparency, alignment, and speed across the board.
The following SPREAD solutions were deployed:
-
Product Explorer: Enabled teams to explore system architecture and the details and interdependencies of requirements, components and functions, and variant delta – Boosting development speed.
-
Product Architect: Helped analyze, compare and align diverse military requirements into a modular architecture, reducing unnecessary variants and complexity, both during quotation and development.
-
Inspector: Linked errors to their configuration specific architectural root causes, allowing faster and more accurate issue resolution by end users and technicians in the field.
-
Upskilling Coach: Delivered configuration-specific digital twins to onboard end users before physical delivery – accelerating ramp-up and improving readiness from day one.
Impact
SPREAD’s solutions directly and quickly translated into measurable outcomes for the defense Prime:
-
20% faster time-to-market: Supported requirement and variant management, paired with a better understanding of interdependencies, enabled modular and accelerated development.
-
+5% revenue increase & earlier cashflows: The digital Product Twin allowed military customers to train and prepare before delivery – creating additional revenue and cash flow earlier before physical delivery.
-
60% faster issue resolution: Full visibility into system interdependencies enabled faster diagnostics and resolution of E/E errors.
“We decided to work with SPREAD, as their solution can make the holistic understanding of how a product really functions transparent across its domains of mechanics, electronics, and software. In our industry, this understanding is essential.”
— R&D Manager
