How BURY reached ASPICE level 2 and 3 with IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management

01 / 06 · ContextBURY and the move to electric cars

Car makers are moving to electric vehicles, pushed by buyers and by stricter emission rules. BURY, which makes information and communication systems for cars, answered with its own range of electric car chargers.

Its customers expect every component to meet IATF 16949, ISO 26262 and ASPICE. New products also bring cybersecurity and functional safety requirements, so the engineering process has to prove more, for more products, at the same time.

02 / 06 · ChallengeChallenge: a system the company had outgrown

BURY’s previous engineering lifecycle system had not grown with the company and was missing functions the teams needed. Availability and performance problems regularly stopped engineers from finishing their daily work.

Project information also lived in several separate tools. Marcin Blacha, BURY’s senior system administrator, says storing it that way “was a source of many ambiguities”: nobody could be sure which copy of a requirement or test result was current.

03 / 06 · SolutionSolution: the whole IBM ELM platform, not single tools

We compared the options with BURY, and the company chose IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management. BURY deployed the full platform at once rather than tool by tool, so that adding components later would not disrupt running projects:

• IBM DOORS Next for requirements
• IBM Engineering Test Management for quality and testing
• Jazz Reporting Service and IBM Engineering Publishing for reports and project documents
• OSLC links to the other tools BURY works with

We set up a separate test environment and trained the first groups of users there on every product before they touched live work. Nothing had to be migrated: projects already under way finished in the old system, and every new project started in ELM.

The deployment took about three months and was as much about the organization as the software: new processes had to be agreed and set up in the tools. After go-live we stayed on for support, including the report templates in Publishing.

04 / 06 · ResultsResults: ASPICE level 2 and 3, one place for product data

• BURY meets ASPICE levels 2 and 3 and is working toward higher process maturity
• Requirements, tests and reports sit in one central repository instead of several tools
• More than half of the 2,200 employees use the platform, and the number is growing
• The availability and performance problems of the old system are gone
• Global Configuration manages variants: one core product, adapted for each car maker, including Bentley, BMW and VW. We are now adjusting BURY’s processes for variant components.

The next test is the charger range. BURY expects ELM to let it start scale-up production within a few months, and Global Configuration matters more as the company adds customers abroad.

05 / 06About BURY

BURY was founded in 1987 and is headquartered in Löhne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It has sites in Mielec and Rzeszów in Poland and in Huamantla, Mexico, and employs more than 2,200 people, over 500 of them engineers.

Source: IBM case study: BURY, May 2024.

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