THE TURN-AROUND INNOVATION

Is there a possibility to standardize subsystems for trains? What is the collective interest of all current and future customers of Auxiliary Power Supplies?

What weighs more for the train industry: “price sensitivity” or “perfect technology fit”? PowerTech had to cope with a lot of these questions when we started our development project – here is how we learned what “the market” wants.

Up to today PowerTech delivered about 40.000 APUs to several customers and projects. It would have been easy to put all our experience to the table and combine them to a master solution with everything in it. But no customer will pay for features not requested. In addition: yesterday’s solutions cannot always fit tomorrow’s needs.

For the development PowerBriX we decided to not choose the easy way but the one with the highest likelihood of success:

We started the project with a comprehensive Requirements Gathering process in which we included all PowerTech functions in addition to interviews with our main customers.

As part of the JAD – Joint Application Design methodology, the project team performed the requirements analysis.

In PowerTech we agree today that this was time-consuming but the best decision in the project to ensure the project success.

In the end of the requirements management phase we gathered about 300 functional and non-functional level one requirements which were detailed down into a comprehensive system specification.

The market requirements for Auxiliary Power Units in a nutshell:

Price: it is continuously the most important requirement to reduce cost. (Unit Price and Life-Cycle-Costs)

Size: since space on top and under the vehicle is very limited, any reduction in size is desirable.

Weight: to optimize the weight of the APU means to avoid penalties for overweight for our customers

Maintainability: it is beneficial to consider maintainability and service aspects

In addition to that PowerTech defined the following internal requirements:

Standardization: support cost reduction and optimize our “time-to-market”

Modularization: focus on a clear separation functions in your system architecture

What we found out is that the customers and PowerTech’s expectations are supporting each other. So that we ended up with a simplified because standardized layout of system and the need for the development of a new embedded system.

This was decided 30 months ago – today we know that it was a groundbreaking decision…

Sebastian Thurau, Head of Engineering,
PTC Rail OEM GmbH.