CASE STUDY

Strategic collaboration in product development

The client: The customer is an international automotive group. They own several brands and producers within the same industry and need to achieve economies of scale.

The client's challenge: Some time ago, the customer decided to sell part of the business to a competitor and then enter into a partnership with the competitor to develop joint products. The customer was faced with different challenges in different phases of the collaboration:

  • The customer needed to quickly gain an overview of what needed to be in place to enable joint product development; processes, documentation and organization.
  • The two competing companies needed to get a common IT solution in place in a short time to manage the administrative parts of the partnership (meetings, documents, cases and delivery follow-up)
  • The customer wanted to carry out a preliminary study together with a system supplier linked to the introduction of a new system solution for the exchange of product data.

Our solution: With Ekan's broad competence and specialists in various fields, we were able to help the customer in various phases of the collaboration. In brief, our methodological approach involved:

  • Prepare: A preliminary study focusing on different scenarios to describe product changes where the starting point was a number of questions: How is the change initiated? Which processes must be followed? What documentation is required? Which organizations are affected?
  • Start-ups: An implementation project where Ekan contributed with definition of use cases and requirements, to act as a bridge between the business and the development team, production of manuals and training materials, testing and training of end users.
  • Collaboration: A feasibility study that resulted in a roadmap for commissioning a new system solution in several stages and detailed specification of stage 1 (MVP – Minimum Viable Product)

The result: The scenario descriptions that were developed in the preparation phase meant that the customer was well prepared and had a good overview of the situations that could arise. The administrative solution developed in the start-up phase proved to be applicable in other collaborations as well, so the customer decided to take a comprehensive approach to all ongoing and future collaborations and started a strategic project. The roadmap and specification that was developed became the basis for an implementation project together with the system supplier.

Take part in insights, news and offers from Ekan Management.