New Product Development Processes of BMW Group Company Engineering Precision Design for Manufacture and Assembly: The remarkable success of the BMW Group has been driven by its relentless pursuit of innovation, engineering precision and manufacturing excellence. Technological leadership is as important for the design and manufacture of its premium vehicles as it is for the IT infrastructure that underpins the organization’s operations.

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Challenge:

The remarkable success of the BMW Group has been driven by its relentless pursuit of innovation, engineering precision and manufacturing excellence. Technological leadership is as important for the design and manufacture of its premium vehicles as it is for the IT infrastructure that underpins the organisation’s operations. As a result, the company’s central IT department continually strives to improve its efficiency and performance. It recently turned its attention to how it could better manage and support the 100,000 PCs used by BMW Group employees spread across about 20 countries. The IT department wished to address four key issues:

• Increase efficiency of software deployments. Like most organisations, BMW’s current software distribution method requires PCs to be switched on to receive updates. To avoid user downtime, companywide software deployments are usually conducted overnight but are dependent on users leaving their PCs switched on. This leaves a small, but significant, percentage of PCs that miss the initial upgrade cycle, resulting in IT wasting valuable time on repeatedly managing the distribution of software updates until complete compliance is achieved. BMW distributes critical patches and updates monthly and they take, on average, 36 hours to be successfully installed on all PCs. The organisation wanted to cut down installation time by increasing the initial hit-rate.
  
• Improve security. BMW has undertaken many measures to protect itself against unauthorised access and the misuse of data. As part of this security system, it wanted a reliable method to ensure anti-virus software and virus-definition files are kept up to date on all platforms.
  
• Reduce desk-side visits and PC downtime. Both the time spent on desk-side visits to resolve PC problems and the resulting loss of employee productivity from PC downtime represent a significant cost to BMW. Downtime due to hardware failure currently averages 4.4 hours per incident while downtime due to software failure averages 6.3 hours. The company was therefore keen to increase the speedand success of remote problem resolution by the IT helpdesk.
  

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