Research On The Development Process Improvement In Continental BU ES

It’s been over 100 years since the first vehicle with internal combustion engine was invented. Now vehicle has become an indispensable product to peoples’ life. The vehicle itself has also developed from humble prototype to a complicate system with machinery, materials, manufacturing, electronics and controlling combined together. We can say that the vehicle incorporates the highest technical in civilian areas, which is a result as human science and wisdom.Modern cars can be simply divided into two systems, mechanical systems and electronic control systems. The electronic control system is combined with many sensors, actuators, control units and the communication between them. In a modern hi-end vehicle, there can be dozens of control units which related to hundreds of electronic components! Faced with such a complex system, how to better and more comprehensive overall quality control of automotive products has plagued the entire automotive industry. In particular, for those control units who are at the center of control systems, it requires to be monitored on development process. Faced with this problem, automobile manufacturers in Europe chose Automotive SPICE®.Automotive SPICE® was born in 2005, which is a strategy developed by major European car manufacturers. It is designed as “an evaluation process for the automotive industry Process Assessment Model”. Its purpose is, in one development project to improve the quality of electronic control unit(ECU) and onboard computer. Automotive SPICE® plays an important role on improving the quality of project and ruling the development process. The implementation of Automotive SPICE® processes in the enterprise, offers significant benefits on improving the quality of R & D team.The background was the R&D quality improvement of Continental Automotive BU ES in China. The paper introduced the history of Automotive SPICE®, the processes division, the capability levels, and the assessment strategy. The target was to archive HIS Scope Level 2 finally in project D. As an opportunity of internal Automotive SPICE® assessment on project C, the team could have an chance of deeply understanding the thinking on system requirements analysis process, system architecture design process, system integration and integration test process and system qualification test process in system engineering process group.With the analyzing on the results from internal assessment of project C, the team understood the disadvantages of current process, such as process definition, process execution and process management. The process optimization of system engineering process group was developed based on current process and the requirements from Automotive SPICE®, without changing current organization structure and with current R&D tools fully reused.In the implementation phase of the optimized processes, the first step was to introduce the optimized process to the whole team by training. Then a target was set to the team members to make every clear on the direction. Finally, by applying the PDCA theory, the optimized process was implemented with continuous improvement to archive the target.With the fine implementation of the optimized process, the product quality of BU ES was improved, the risk of after sale market was reduced and the team performance was also enhanced.This paper is the first time to set Automotive SPICE® as the research object, which acts a good reference for the domestic auto industry to implement the Automotive SPICE® audit. With my hope to initiate, to attract more people into the study on Automotive SPICE® in the future.