Automotive Engineering - December 2024 - 32

Q&
A
Envorso wants to help OEMs make better
software in-house
At the Reuters Automotive USA 2024 conference in Detroit,
SAE Media spoke with Stuart Taylor, chief product officer of
Envorso, a consultancy with a mission to help OEMs and Tier 1
suppliers write better software. Companies have been
plagued with issues around software written both in-house
and via outside contractors.
There is a debate around just what " software defined " means
in " SDV. " Is there a solution that would get everyone on the
same page?
If you think back to what we did
when we were defining the ADAS
levels, that's what software defined
vehicle now needs. It says, okay, you
are this, you are at this point along
the journey, and your next step is this.
The concept is not new. In fact, we've
been doing it in the industry for
many, many years, as long as I've
been in the industry.
Part of the problem we see in
these new-to-OEM segments, such
as the battery industry, is that the
companies need to learn faster and
iterate faster.
To a certain extent, fail fast is kind of
an industry trend word. But the reality
is, when you're working in those
smaller, cash-constrained OEMs - a
startup environment - they are willing
to take risks but fail early in the
process so they can pivot to doing
the next thing. Instead of it being a
straight long shot to the outcome,
they jig backwards and forwards,
and they get to the answer much
quicker. And we need that thinking
in the traditional OEMs and the traditional
tier ones.
Is part of the OEM difficulty that development
has traditionally been
done in pieces and subsystems, rather
than as a whole?
Conway's Law is a great one, if you
know computer science from the
1960s, [roughly, software will have
the structure of the organization producing it.] If you don't
have a systems level of thinking, then it's very hard to integrate.
What we're seeing from an industry standpoint is that
the challenge is much bigger compute centers, so better
silicon, higher powered compute, allowing you to consolidate
much more of the in-vehicle decision making at a higher
level, and allowing those software stacks to be well integrated
and to work effectively with each other. The challenge
of getting to that place is a shorter path for the startups,
because in their mind, that's
the logical outcome. The OEMs have
a high dependency on the technical
capability of those suppliers, and
then they have the challenge of integrating
that again.
What has happened in the industry
is they've hired many of those
good software engineers from their
tier ones and their teams have
struggled. Resetting some of that
and making sure that we talk a lot in
electronics about architecture, settling
on an architecture that is going
to be capable now and in the future
and building your software around
that, happens at startups much faster
than for the traditional OEMs.
Getting out of that is the challenge.
Envorso's chief product officer, Stuart Taylor, says the
company's consultants work alongside OEM and tier
one software developers.
" Settling on an architecture
that is going to be capable
now and in the future, and
building your software
around that, happens at
startups much faster than
for the traditional OEMs. "
What's different about the way you
approach software consulting?
[Envorso is] in there with that OEM
or with that tier one supplier. Getting
our hands dirty and having those
difficult discussions as a team is an
essential part of driving towards a
better outcome. I think where a lot of
traditional consulting companies fall
short is they'll give you a beautiful
pattern book of " just follow this
playbook, and you'll be fine in the
report. " The reality is that every business
has nuance. It has characters. It
has aligned goals or misaligned
goals. And I think being there at the
table, working on it, with the customer,
is essential.
Chris Clonts
32 December 2024
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