YASA Success Story: Developing E-motors with ASPICE & ISO 26262 Requirements

PTC’s customer success story describes the use case of YASA, this UK-based automotive electromotor technology company, and the benefits they were able to realize using Codebeamer.

YASA is a spinoff company from the University of Oxford. Founder, Tim Woolmer established the company to commercialize the electric motor technology he was working on during his PhD. By today, Tim and his team have driven the company to success. As a notable example of this success, Ferrari chose YASA’s e-motor for the SF90 Stradale, their first hybrid production series supercar in 2019.

The challenge: Agile + ASPICE and ISO 26262

Prior to initiating a project to search for, purchase, and implement integrated Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), YASA had a typical product development toolset in place. They were using Excel spreadsheets along with other legacy platforms to control development processes. This made it very difficult to manage traceability – and even more importantly, made it practically impossible to comply with stringent ISO 26262 and ASPICE requirements. Add to that the fact that YASA was in the process of going Agile in their software development, so they had to adapt to the self-organizing nature of this methodology.

As YASA started to undertake a large project with an automotive OEM, they quickly understood that new tooling was necessary to satisfy regulatory requirements. They needed a system to ensure transparency, in requirements management, to define compliant workflows, and establish end-to-end traceability. YASA wanted to capture test and validation results and link those to requirements to show lifecycle-wide traceability.

Selecting Codebeamer

To meet all those needs, YASA carefully evaluated solutions on the market, and ended up choosing Codebeamer. One of the key drivers of this decision was Codebeamer’s demonstrated ability to support compliance with Automotive SPICE and ISO 26262 for functional safety.

YASA manages 10-12 projects with Agile, and the team uses the platform to manage the software development process from requirements through tasks, all the way to releases. Due to the software team’s success with and enthusiasm for Codebeamer, the hardware team is now looking into adopting the platform to support their development activities.

The development team at YASA enjoys stricter control over process workflows, efficient collaboration, increased visibility in their activities, and gapless traceability along the delivery process.

"Having a single tool in place that we can use to coordinate our activities rather than having requirements and design documentation spread across multiple files and across the network has been hugely beneficial,” said Will Treharne, Head of Software, YASA