Improving the system architecting process through the use of Lean tools

The impact of embedded systems within the automotive industry has grown very rapidly and is today influencing most part of the product development process. This technological change puts high demands on the development process in order for the company to stay competitive. The architecting process is performed during the early phases of the development process when uncertainty is very high. The architecting process will not create immediate value to the end customer, but rather create the architecture on which value in terms of product features can be developed. The architecture will enable value creation when working properly or, in the worst case, prevent value creation. Lean is a product development philosophy that aims at creating value for the end customer. A Lean tool used to improve the value creation within a process is Value Stream Mapping (VSM). VSM has in this work been adapted and evaluated to analyze and identify improvements of the architecting process within embedded systems development. In this paper we present practical experiences from using this adapted VSM. The evaluation was conducted through interviews at two automotive manufacturers. VSM is shown to be a valuable tool to identify waste and thereby improve the architecting process.