Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd: Quality Estimation The introduction of the incremental cost estimation method CoBRA® at Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd. by Fraunhofer IESE led to a provable reduction of estimation errors to a mere 14% – an extraordinarily low value for IT projects. This industry project was performed in collaboration with the Japanese IPA/SEC – Information-technology Promotion Agency / Software Engineering Center in the context of a technology transfer initiative of the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry METI.

In the year 2010, ECOPETROL, one of the worldwide leading companies in the oil and gas industry, launched an initiative for aligning its IT- and software-related activities better with its business goals. This initiative changed the traditional role of IT from a classical service provider and easily replaceable cost factor in the company to a central information provider that contributes to the company’s success by providing high-quality information when critical management decisions must be made. In order to achieve this, the goals and strategies of the IT department had to be mapped to the business goals of ECOPETROL and their value had to be made more transparent in terms of the overall organization. In addition, a KPI system was developed to enable the objective assessment of the success/failure of a strategy and its optimization over time.

Since 2004, numerous novel software engineering methods in the measurement area have been developed together with the Japanese IPA Software Engineering Center (IPA/SEC) in an ongoing strategic cooperation and have been successfully introduced in many companies and organizations in Japan.