OMNEX VIRTUAL CUSTOMER CONFERENCE 2024
In today’s complex automotive and industrial environments, functional safety and cybersecurity are paramount. As technology becomes more deeply integrated into our products, ensuring safety and compliance throughout product development has become a critical challenge. Nikhil, during the recent customer conference, explained how OBOT, Omnex Systems’ AI-powered platform, can help organizations address these challenges by automating critical confirmation measures such as audits, assessments, and reviews.
The Industry Challenge: Navigating Complexity
As the automotive industry evolves, electronics, software, and embedded systems have become central to product development. However, this increasing complexity brings new challenges in managing functional safety, cybersecurity, and overall product quality. Nikhil highlighted how organizations today are grappling with the following issues:
- Disconnected systems causing delays in sharing information across teams.
- Global supply chains with teams spread across different time zones.
- The balancing act between compliance and innovation that often slows down development.
- Identifying issues too late in the product development cycle, leading to costly rework.
How OBOT Helps: The AI Solution
OBOT connects to an organization’s IT systems, analyzes data, and generates real-time insights. It performs both preventive and detective roles, helping organizations avoid issues early and efficiently track improvements. OBOT’s key features include:
- Automated Audits, Assessments, and Reviews: OBOT performs evaluations on embedded systems, specifically focusing on functional safety, cybersecurity, and quality, generating a list of findings and improvement opportunities so teams can act before issues escalate.
- Real-Time Insights: OBOT syncs data continuously, giving teams up-to-date findings for quick decision-making.
- Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis: OBOT assesses projects against predefined criteria and measures compliance with industry standards like ISO 26262 and ISO/SAE 21434.
- Continuous Learning: OBOT uses machine learning to evolve over time, adapting to new data, past project learnings, and updated criteria for better outcomes with each iteration.
The Impact: Real-World Benefits
In requirements management, for example, OBOT can analyze thousands of lines of safety and security requirements, checking if they align with ISO 26262 standards — a process that would normally be extremely time-consuming, but which OBOT automates, completing the task in hours instead of days or weeks. With functional safety assessments, OBOT ensures each work product is evaluated against safety criteria, streamlining the process and reducing the risk of late-stage issues, and helping organizations save on costly rework.
Significant Cost and Time Savings
A key takeaway from the session was the substantial cost savings that OBOT brings. By automating review processes, OBOT reduces manual review time by up to 60%. For example, across five functional safety projects, OBOT could save around $726,500 in review costs alone — savings that free up resources for innovation and help companies meet deadlines more effectively.
Looking ahead, OBOT’s ability to learn from each project and adapt to new standards and requirements — helping create requirements templates from lessons learned, and sharing insights across teams and projects — ensures it continues to add value over time, enabling companies to meet both compliance and innovation goals.
Presenter
Nikhil Unnikrishnan
Project Manager, Electric & Autonomous Vehicles, Omnex Inc.
Nikhil is a consultant with extensive experience collaborating on automotive hardware, software and mechanical systems design and development. He has a strong track record implementing best practices in ISO 26262 Functional Safety, Automotive SPICE, ISO/SAE 21434 Cybersecurity and SOTIF to improve process efficiency, with work spanning assessments, process documentation development and rollout oversight for top automotive Tier 1 and Tier 2 companies, on projects ranging from electric battery packs to autonomous driving technology and ADAS sensors. He is a Certified Principal Assessor, Lead Auditor, Lean Six Sigma Green Belt and Quality Process Analyst with a rich automotive QMS background, and also trains Automotive SPICE, Functional Safety and IATF integration at Omnex. Nikhil holds a postgraduate degree in Systems Engineering and Management from the University of Texas at Dallas and a Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering from Amrita University, India. He is the Project Manager for Omnex’s Electric and Autonomous Vehicle projects and subject matter expert for EV-AV platform product development.