An agile approach to vehicle attribute management

Approach

HORIBA MIRA employed a highly-flexible approach with extensive use of digital engineering to enable Byton to meet its aggressive targets for cost and timescale.

The project began by defining the customer profiles and typical drive cycles for a diverse range of target markets. From there, HORIBA MIRA took a whole-vehicle approach, managing engineering teams spread across the client, external suppliers and HORIBA MIRA’s own in-house personnel to deliver the required attributes.

Flexibility played a key part in this project. HORIBA MIRA was able to deploy consultants within a very short space of time, giving Byton a head start. This gave the team instant access to proven methodologies and processes with good background correlation.

As the programme progressed, Byton was able to rapidly grow its organisation with confidence, knowing that HORIBA MIRA had the capacity and the capability to fill any gaps that may emerge along the way.

Successes and benefits

HORIBA MIRA worked with Byton through to the start of production, successfully delivering the required vehicle attributes. Highlights from the project include:

• An open and agile approach from HORIBA MIRA that allowed Byton to ramp up or ramp down support as required.
• A simulation-first methodology, which was key to streamlining the development and managing risk.
• Educating the OEM and tier one suppliers on engineering process flow, from design and CAE through to DFMEA and definition of DVPs.
• Carrying out fleet management and definition of test plans for physical testing. Managing DVPs to deliver maximum benefit from the available test vehicles.

It was very much an attribute-led programme, working with a lot of different domain teams across Byton, HORIBA MIRA and external suppliers. The way we managed that was to embed our core team very much within Byton itself.
James Halstead, Manager and Chief Engineer, HORIBA MIRA