The world continues to see remarkable innovation in technology, such as Advanced Driver Assisted Systems (ADAS), next generation flight systems and smarter medical devices. With these advancements, development teams are being challenged on how they innovate, keep up with their competition, and improve their engineering processes. The three main factors driving market evolution are:

1. Technology – There are multiple factors at play including inexpensive microprocessors and sensors, AI and analytics providing previously unavailable insights, and access to ubiquitous data all contributing to smarter products.
2. Economic – A global marketplace and an expanding partner ecosystem that allows companies to specialize. Broader implementations of Industry 4.0 automating manufacturing to run uninterrupted, 24×7.
3. Social – Governments and private organizations being held more accountable for their actions by the public and customers respectively, sustainability has become a key area of focus

Software is the element that underlines these three factors, helping companies be more digital and driving exponential growth across industries. However, many companies are still struggling to fully integrated software development with their mechanical and electronics development processes. They need to embrace the digital transformation of their engineering. In many companies, the electronics, software, and mechanics development teams work in silos, still relying on manual processes, leading to lack of end-to-end visibility.

This lack of visibility limits a company’s ability to integrate both internal and external standards into their development processes, which negatively impacts productivity, quality and leads to operational stress within these companies.

Attend IBM Think 2021, our virtual conference happening on May 11 (Americas) and 12 (APAC and EMEA) to learn how to keep critical software development on track and on schedule (Session number 2088). You will hear directly hear from Dr. T. John Koo, Director of Cyber-Physical Systems at Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute (ASTRI), on how his company leverages technology to enable much needed visibility in their development process.

Will Streit
Director Offering Management, IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management