BigLever Software, the leading provider of Product Line Engineering (PLE) solutions, today announced that the company’s founder and CEO, Dr. Charles Krueger, will be a featured presenter at the Method Park “Talk in the Park” event on April 26, 2016 in Rochester, Mich. Krueger and key executives from a major automotive manufacturer and Method Park will present and explore the latest advances in PLE that are driving automotive manufacturing to new levels of innovation.
“Automotive companies today are faced with the challenges of managing the diversity of complex product lines across the full product family lifecycle – from portfolio planning to engineering, product management, supply chain, manufacturing, sales, and service,” said Krueger. “PLE has emerged as a game-changing engineering paradigm for addressing these challenges. By taking an innovative feature-based approach to managing product variation across the lifecycle, major automotive manufacturers have achieved significant competitive advantage and dramatic results, including increased quality and efficiencies, while at the same time, reducing time to market.”
PLE addresses engineering complexity by dramatically simplifying the creation, delivery, maintenance, and evolution of a product line portfolio. It uses a shared set of engineering assets, a managed set of features, and an efficient means for automating the production of a product line. At the event, Krueger and other presenters will discuss how PLE is delivering major gains in efficiency through the creation of a “single source of feature truth" for all software, electronic, mechanical, and operations artifacts across the lifecycle.
Other significant PLE capabilities to be discussed at the event include:
- Bill of Features – allows companies to use a Bill of Features to determine materials (mechanical, electrical, wiring, software, calibrations, requirements, designs, test cases, documentation, etc.) rather than a Bill of Materials to determine features.
- Multistage Configuration – enables product line managers and marketers to better comprehend, organize, and manage complex product family trees based on product line features.
- Feature/Option Bundles – simplifies the complexity of feature choice “combinatorics” by defining feature option bundles, allowing product line managers to effectively analyze and manage those bundles.
Presenters will also address how leading-edge PLE capabilities will be leveraged in AUTOSAR (Automotive Open Systems Architecture) to support the establishment of a common platform across the whole automotive industry, including manufacturers, software suppliers, and tool developers.
BigLever Session
Presentation: “Mega-scale Product Line Engineering for the Automotive Industry”
Presenter: Dr. Charles Krueger
Date: Tues., April 26, 2016, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Place: Royal Park Hotel, Rochester, Mich.
Krueger is an acknowledged thought leader in the PLE field, with more than 25 years of experience in software engineering practice and more than 60 articles, columns, book chapters, conference keynotes and session presentations. Through active involvement in key industry events and organizations, he brings innovative PLE concepts, new generation methodologies and success stories to the forefront of the systems and software engineering community. Krueger has proven expertise in leading commercial product line development teams, and helping companies establish some of the industry’s most notable PLE practices across a spectrum of industries, including automotive, aerospace and defense, aviation systems, alternative energy, e-commerce, and computer systems. He received his PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.
Method Park’s “Talk in the Park” events are driven by the interests and needs of the community. These interactive events provide an opportunity to meet leaders in topics critical to the industry, learn from their experiences, engage and make connections, and contribute to the discussion.
