How Accuride Europe Uses Scrum for New Product Innovation

Creating the telescopic slides and systems of tomorrow can be difficult to accomplish. At Accuride we aren’t just making sure that our slides are the highest quality available on the market, we want to make sure that our slides are changing the way people interact with the world for generations.

In order to make this happen, we take our research and development very seriously and our expert teams of engineers and designers have the latest tools at their disposal. But it’s not just our fantastic people at Accuride that allow us to come up with the inventive solutions to our customers’ headaches.

We love efficiency at Accuride; our working and engineering frameworks are designed to get the best out of our teams every time. In order to make our teams even more efficient, our project development in Germany has begun to implement Scrum as part of their working processes.

Scrum has its roots set in Japan during the ‘80s in the big car manufacturers as they came up with more efficient ways to manage projects and ensure that projects were being completed swiftly and more innovatively.

Scrum was first coined in the early ‘90s and the first Scrum paper was published in 1995. Scrum is now described as a framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value.

Scrum itself is a simple framework for effective team collaboration on complex products. While it was originally designed as a framework for software development, Scrum is equally as useful for engineering projects where an end product is being produced.

One of the major benefits of Scrum is the daily scrum. These allow us quickly to get members of the team together to discuss progress and outline any areas for improvement. This also gives better visibility of progress for the project and we can show our customers prototypes and designs at an earlier stage and allow them to give feedback and input into the ongoing project.

Accuride's Scrum team at work

This means that our customers can have an input into the projects before they are complete so that they are guaranteed to get more out of the end product. Not only does Scrum mean that our customers get better products, the quick processes also means that we are able to cut down timescales.

Thanks to Scrum, Accuride Europe can now design and engineer more innovative linear motion slides and drawer runners for our customers in even quicker timescales. But it’s not just our new telescopic slides that benefits from Scrum.

We are also using Scrum and our customers’ feedback to influence the development process of our existing products. We like to take a fresh look at our existing product line and look for ways where we can improve our world-leading products.

This way we are ensuring that our sliding solutions are always made to the highest quality and are constantly being updated with the latest technology and techniques.

Since Scrum has been integrated into Accuride Europe our engineers and designers have loved working in a much more efficient way and has allowed us to already implement Scrum into some of our automotive and oven projects.

Progress with Scrum is already extremely exciting and we are seeing results that our customers are very happy with. We are currently evaluating expanding Scrum to other areas of Accuride and hope to bring those benefits to our customers.

As Scrum allows our customers to have more influence in our development processes, how would you like to adapt one of our slides to fit your latest project?