>€2M p.a. saved
through faster change process
75% faster
approvals due to targeted routing
On-time
compliance with SOP milestones
A European Automotive OEM faced growing pressure to reduce development costs and accelerate time-to-market for a new vehicle program. As product complexity and functional interdependencies grew, ensuring a targeted and efficient testing strategy became increasingly difficult. Software updates or changes to a single component triggered ripple effects across other functions and components. Without clear visibility into these dependencies, determining what required validation was nearly impossible – leading to broad, unfocused prototype and HiL testing efforts.
Critical testing data such as software release plans, architecture, function models, requirements, and test execution results were fragmented across siloed tools. This made it extremely difficult to assess test maturity, identify coverage gaps, or trace test needs back to specific software changes. As a result, test teams often ran redundant or low-priority validations while missing critical gaps. This led to slow testing and delayed issue detection, creating risks for overarching program milestones.
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:
“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