Siemens’ technology is helping European OEMs streamline aftersales documentation, reduce costs and improve notifications when vehicle maintenance might be required.

The company announced on Tuesday that Siemens’ Capital software electrical design product for its automotive aftersales documentation has been selected by Groupe PSA, considered to be the second largest vehicle manufacturer in Europe.

Groupe PSA is an early innovator of autonomous and connected vehicles, manufacturing five brands including Peugeot, Citroen, DS, Opel and Vauxhall.

Using Siemens Capital’s advanced technology, the company recapped that Groupe PSA has replaced a largely manual process and can now automatically render their electrical system diagrams using data that comes directly from the PSA electrical/electronic (E/E) engineering department and their harness suppliers to help provide “correct-by-construction” assurance. The result is what Siemens believes is accurate documentation created using “as-manufactured” data provided by Groupe PSA’s suppliers designed to help ensure rapid and effective vehicle maintenance when required.

Siemens added that Groupe PSA can now better enable their digital enterprise and continue to innovate the mobile solutions of the future.

Siemens acknowledged that in-house tools for electrical systems can be expensive to maintain, with challenges including IT obsolescence, out-of-date specifications and increasing electrical/electronic system complexity, meaning manual processes can no longer cope and are error-prone.

The Groupe PSA team indicated that it needed a seamless, easy-to-use technology to help ensure electrical data continuity. After exploring the software tools available, the team selected Siemens’ Capital since it can provide “correct-by-construction” automated electrical documentation through diagram synthesis.

“Using Capital for electrical design and aftersales documentation has produced tremendous time and cost savings,” stated Yves Bouvier, vice president of diagnosis at Groupe PSA. “We have already achieved a significant schedule reduction using Capital to deliver our complete schematic after-sales documentation and are targeting above 30% schedule reduction.”

Siemens’ Capital E/E systems development toolchain spans the full electrical system development process from system definition, through design and manufacturing, and into automated service documentation production. Digital continuity of Groupe PSA’s electrical data using Capital can enable aftersales documentation driven directly by the actual engineering design data.

This strategy can provide data accuracy, efficiency and a reduced time-to-market, according to Siemens, which noted it is a competitive advantage in today’s fast-moving automotive industry,

Capital is part of Xcelerator, an integrated portfolio of software, services and application development platform that can be personalized and adapted to fit customer and industry-specific needs to help companies of all sizes become digital enterprises.

“Groupe PSA has been on the cutting-edge of automotive developments, and they recognize the importance of adopting advanced technologies, such as our Capital solution,” said Martin O’Brien, senior vice president of Siemens’ Integrated Electrical Systems business group.

“Using Capital’s in-built digital data continuity, Groupe PSA realizes a competitive advantage, and we anticipate providing them with more digitalization technologies for their next-generation endeavors,” O’Brien went on to say.

To learn more about the Capital solution, go to this website.