Introductory Information: The client was a division of a multinational Tier
1 supplier to the automotive manufacturers, supplying computerized diagnostic equipment into the service garages. The
company's existing products were increasingly becoming commoditized, and the car manufacturers wanted Commercial
Off-The-Shelf (COTS) solutions as much as possible. This presented a problem, since COTS solutions typically contain
very little margin flexibility, and this company was known for high-quality products, and not necessarily the lowest
priced.
The Challenge: With the increasing pressure by the car manufacturers
to not be held hostage by any single supplier, open standards were beginning to emerge, and were gaining support across the
industry. In the past, each car manufacturer supported a proprietary solution for diagnosing their vehicles
in their franchised service garages. Now the push was to standardize, since diagnostic equipment was not viewed as a
competitive advantage for the manufacturer. To play in an open standards marketplace, the client needed to be either
number one or number two in the industry. This meant being the preferred supplier to at least 40% of the global
car manufacturers.
Recommendations: After performing a
detailed analysis of the emerging market for computerized automotive diagnostic equipment, we found that most of the
proprietary solutions that the car manufacturers had been using for almost 20 years could be emulated on a new standardized
hardware platform by using a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). By designing in flexibility from the start, this
new hardware platform could be used at any of the global car manufacturers requiring nothing more than a simple reprogramming
of the FPGA. And, by adhering to the emerging standards, the new hardware platform was future-proof as well, thus ensuring
that the car manufacturer's investment today would not be wasted tomorrow.
Results:
The new hardware platform was rolled out at several automobile manufacturers to their engineering departments for testing. One
major car manufacturer has chosen to baseline this new platform in all of their franchised service centers, amounting to over
17,000 worldwide. Several other manufacturers are currently evaluating the platform, and the response from the industry
has been overwhelmingly positive, including press coverage (see articles above). By designing and building such a flexible
hardware platform and adhering to open standards, the client has beaten the competition to market and is quickly emerging
as the front runner in this new open environment.
