Scrum in mechanical product development. Case study of a mechanical product development team using Scrum within BEA company.

Abstract

Nowadays, product development is one of the key element companies have to master to increase profit margins, save costs and be able to grow in the market. Requirements increase a lot these days and there is a huge demand for delivering better and faster, to beat every competitor on the market. Implementing an innovation management solution seems to be a good weapon to face these challenges and increase company’s decision making abilities. Some new managing development ways emerged these last few years and quite of revolutionized the way software are developed. The common thread between all the methods are the ability to respond easily to change. They are all based on iterative and incremental ways of development, using by cross-functional teams. These methods received great feedbacks from the industry and are now used in a lot of well-known companies. Creators of the alternative development methods came together and formed the Agile Manifesto which highlights the "Agile software development", a digest of all these iterative methods. The most used one is "Scrum", which is applied in large companies such as Google, EVS, or Microsoft. At first glance, it seems that this framework is perceived as being only applicable in software development teams. But when we look at it closer, there are no obvious reasons that non-software environments couldn’t be able to use it. Some organizations are composed by teams where hardware and software developers are working closely together. That is the case of the company BEA, located in Liège (Belgium), which develop (in particular) pedestrian detectors for automatic doors. Software teams in BEA started to use Scrum inside their software development teams and it has led to very good results. There is an interest inside the R&D department to learn from this experience and investigate if mechanical teams within product development could also achieve benefits of using Scrum.