“Corona goes, digitalization stays.”
ARRK Engineering is a development specialist based in Munich, Germany. At ARRK Engineering, they have a long, ongoing partnership with the automotive world, having worked with some of the most successful brands in the industry including BMW, VW, Porsche, Audi, Honda and many more.
Next to E-mobility and autonomous driving, digital solutions have the highest demand on the market. Strategically for ARRK Engineering, it was a logical step to establish a Digitalization & Software department in December last year. Since then, round about 50 colleagues in Germany and Romania have been working on solutions and products in the digitization and software environment.
Interview with Oliver Sawitzki, Department Leader Digitalization & Software provides insights into digitalization solutions and strategies at ARRK Engineering.
Easy Engineering: What is your motivation for digitalization?
Oliver Sawitzki: Our customers have high expectations on digitalization. We therefore ask ourselves the question: “How can we as ARRK Engineering make life better for them?” These can be solutions for development, production or the administrative area. Our motivation when developing customer-specific solutions is “Think customer centric and try to walk in the customers’ shoes”. We combine domain knowledge with digitalization and software expertise to offer customers an all-round happy package including requirement management, data management, IT architecture, software development and operation.
E.E: Where does the customers need for digitalization come from and how important is digitalization in your field?
O.S: Our customers are rethinking and no longer see themselves as vehicle manufacturers but as mobility service providers. Data plays a central role in digital transformation. The collection of sensor, movement or behavioral data, in combination with intelligent processing using data science methods, enables predictions to be made regarding route planning, component damage, safety mechanisms and many more.
The second major motivation for digitalization in the automotive industry is the reduction of development and production times. This requires modeling processes as efficiently as possible and being able to predict the next steps at any time. Competitive pressure is greater than ever, especially at present, as many agile startups are competing with the sluggish large OEMs.
E.E: Which digital solutions is ARRK Engineering currently offering?
O.S: Our current main solutions are:
- App Development (Mobile or Browser);
- Data Bases;
- CAE Software;
- Data Science;
- UX/UI;
- Business Intelligence;
- Digital Validation;
- Consulting.
We combine the solutions to ARRK Engineering digital products. In parallel, we have growing competences like e. g. Low Code or augmented reality solutions. The business is changing fast and we always want to be up to date.
E.E: Which is the most digitalized product?
O.S: Our current best-selling product is the ARRK Engineering SaaS solution, which offers individual web applications based on AWS or Azure. In agile teams of German and Romanian colleagues, we work closely with customers from the automotive industry.
A typical use case is the engineering journey improvement. Typical engineering processes built on error prone excel spreadsheets, network drives and mail distributors will be centralized and individually controlled with the ARRK Engineering solution. This creates transparency, reduces costs and the engineers can focus on their actual development knowledge.
E.E: Do you plan to implement digitalization in other products / solutions? (What industries do you think will be more digitalized in the future?)
O.S: We plan to scale our solutions to further industry sectors like medicine, energy or finance.
E.E: What was the employee feedback regarding the digitalization process?
O.S: We have many new and young employees who are given a lot of freedom to use their own initiative. But the freedom also requires a sense of responsibility towards customers and the team. Our employees receive further training to enable them to play an effective role in shaping the digitization process. Digitalization is therefore an enabler for personal and professional development. We are currently looking for backend developers, frontend developers, data engineers or iOS developers in both Germany and Romania.
Oliver Sawitzki, , Department Leader Digitalization & Software
E.E: In which directions do you think digitalization is heading towards?
O.S: The market will evolve rapidly and the automotive industry, which is considered slow in change processes and conservative, will become a leader in digitalized development and production. As ARRK Engineering we are a strong partner to shape this transformation process.
ARRK ENGINEERING GMBH
Frankfurter Ring 160, 80807 Munich
Tel.: 089 31857-0, Fax: 089 31857-111
E-mail: info@arrk-engineering.com
Internet: www.arrk-engineering.com