European Auto OEM saves >€2M annually through faster and transparent change management in R&D

Challenge

A European Automotive OEM was under growing pressure to accelerate development timelines and remain competitive against fast-moving Chinese entrants. As vehicle complexity and functional interdependencies increased, efficient change management became critical. Even minor changes triggered ripple effects across numerous components and functions. Without full visibility into these interdependencies, teams struggled to assess the real impact of each change.

The existing process lacked visibility into these interconnections, leading to unfocused analysis and broad approval requests. As a result, change approvals became bloated, slow, and costly – often involving far more engineers than necessary. The existing process relied heavily on manual coordination. Approvals were tracked manually in Excel and coordinated through disconnected processes, resulting in misalignment, redundant reviews, and missed deadlines. Information about the changes, components and responsible engineers were siloed in different systems, requiring manual consolidation. On average, the OEM engaged five times more approvers than needed – spending more effort on securing sign-offs than on implementing the actual changes.

Approach

To improve the change management process, the OEM deployed SPREAD’s Engineering Intelligence Platform. The setup took two months and included ingestion of change tickets, E/E architecture, software BoMs, variant data, and unstructured ticket documentation. The solution was then rolled out across all component and function responsible engineers. The teams gained access to tailored insights – integrated into their daily workflows without requiring tool replacements.

Based on SPREAD’s Platform, the Product Explorer in R&D was deployed:

• Visualization of cross-domain dependencies, so engineers could instantly understand which components and functions are impacted by a change

• Automatic identification of relevant owners, with the system highlighting only the relevant engineers required for approval, reducing approval scope and time

• Live change management tooling, where all parties collaborate in one interface to manage changes, documents, and approvals in real time

SPREAD’s solution directly and quickly translated into measurable results for the OEM:

• >€2M saved annually: through time and resource reduction in the change process
• 75% faster approvals: due to targeted routing and reduced number of approvers
• On-time change management: ensuring compliance with SOP milestones

“We are much faster in our approval process because we can identify the needed engineers automatically, based on the product information incl. architectures and variants. This doesn’t just create cost savings, it ensures that our engineers are taking the approval process more seriously and are motivated to check faster.”
— VP Conformity