Big industrial enterprises from the aviation and automotive sector produce highly complex products from a plethora of components, which have to be coordinated. The requirements for the configuration management grow with complexity. For the process to remain transparent, hundreds of people have to follow a unified system during the planning phase.

Dr. Oliver Wahlen and his P3 consultant team were assigned by an aviation company, during the development process, to restore lost transparency by introducing a planning software. “At project start the process procedures were unclear, especially with regard to the change management. On top of that every team used its own listings to schedule work orders.” Under those circumstances the management was hardly able to control the development process.

First Wahlen and his team analyzed the processes and supplier interfaces. The demands of the company could not be met with a standard solution. The complete redevelopment of a software on the other hand would have been too time consuming, so that Wahlen recommended the customer to customize a standard solution: “Based on a detailed process comprehension we were able to design a modular concept, which added configuration- and supplier management components to a standard project management software using databases.

In a combination of the classic V-model and methods of agile software development, the solution was developed by P3. In close cooperation with the client: “Especially if the customer doesn’t know exactly what he wants, his involvement in the software development process is crucial for success.

The integration of all configuration and planning data in a central database enables the customer to control the process chain from start to finish today. Wahlen: “Today there are 1000 users working with this software – tendency increasing. We took care of the needed transparency!”