Automotive SPICE® at a Subsidiary in China

The challenge

An automotive supplier based in Germany but with worldwide locations was faced with meeting OEM requirements at its facility in China. The company had to prove Automotive SPICE® Level 2 in two projects on control devices (ignition lock and sensing element of roof unit) for Chinese OEMs. Previously, the process landscape of the location was spread to MS Word, Excel and Enterprise Architect. The organization was unable to transfer its ASPICE-compliant processes from the German headquarters to its Chinese location due to market and project requirements.

Project duration

• 1.5 years
• 1 consultant

Our approach

• Rapid process-typing approach
• Intense training and weekly telephone conference
• Definition and review of new processes
• Application of Stages in the cloud

Due to the special and particularly challenging time constraints, we applied a rapid process-typing approach: creating processes in a running project. Intense training was provided for one week, followed by weekly two-hour telephone conferences which included 10 to 15 of the customer’s project engineers. Following these sessions, our experts defined step-by-step processes which in turn were reviewed by the customer.

This cycle was maintained over 1.5 years. With the VDA scope of Automotive SPICE® (16 individual process areas), we were able to define processes perfectly fit to the customer’s project. Our experts also applied the cloud version of our own tool, Stages, to define processes to enable quick synchronization and adjustment on our servers.

Benefits

• Achieving Automotive SPICE® Level 2 in running Projects
• Acquire new Automotive SPICE® Level 3 projects

The customer successfully proved Automotive SPICE® Level 2 under the VDA scope as requested by the OEMs in both projects. Additionally, the customer can now maintain its processes, which enabled the organization to prove Automotive SPICE® Level 3 and win further projects.