Automotive OEM: Product Lifecycle Management Automation
Germany
A leading European automotive supplier, serving top OEMs in thermal systems and exhaust technologies, faced mounting inefficiencies in its product change and phase-out process. With no dedicated PLM platform in place, the company relied on SAP ECC, Excel trackers, email threads, and network folders to manage change requests across teams in Germany and Poland. The result was a process that had grown too complex to manage efficiently. Each engineering change required significant manual effort, with some taking weeks or months to close. One large programme dragged on for nearly three years and consumed over 400 hours of engineering time. Routine changes regularly required 10 to 50 hours each. And because change approvals were often delayed, the team faced frequent expedite costs — including premium freight, weekend overtime, and late scrambles to relabel or rework parts.