Breaking Down Information Silos. Connecting Tools Seamlessly.

ALM and PLM tool vendors regularly promise totality: everything in one system, no media breaks, no silos. In practice, this never works. No single tool covers all disciplines of complex product development equally well.

The result in real engineering organisations: best-of-breed. Enterprise Architect for architecture models, DOORS for requirements, GitLab for code, a specialised FMEA tool for safety analysis. Each tool is excellent in its domain. But the data lives in silos.

The consequences are always the same: manual, error-prone transfers between tools with no end-to-end traceability. Compliance evidence becomes a nightmare. Changes in Tool A are invisible in Tool B until downstream errors occur. No organisation-wide picture: what do we actually know? What state is the system in?

Toolchain integration is not an end in itself. It arises from a concrete need: one of the following three triggers.

Compliance-driven: Traceability Across Tool Boundaries

The most common trigger: you need to prove traceability: from stakeholder requirements in DOORS through the system architecture in Enterprise Architect down to the code. ASPICE, ISO 26262 and DO-178C demand end-to-end traceability. No single tool provides this overview by itself.

itemis ANALYZE aggregates data from all tools and creates a continuous, queryable traceability layer, non-invasively, without modifying the artefacts in the source systems. Result: compliance evidence at the push of a button, not on request. → Requirements Traceability

Automation: Code Generation and FMEA from the Architecture

Another strong trigger: you want to derive artefacts automatically from the system model, not transfer them manually.

A typical example: Enterprise Architect contains the system architecture model. With the EA-Bridge you connect the model to your code generation pipeline, for instance to implement AUTOSAR methodologies on a UML basis and maintain the underlying toolchain. Another example: the System FMEA is derived directly from the system architecture and automatically transferred into your FMEA tool: consistently, reproducibly and without manual transfer. → Reference: FORVIA HELLA: Automatic FMEA Generation from System Architecture

Engineering Intelligence: Knowing What the Organisation Knows

The most underestimated trigger: you want to know what is actually available in your engineering organisation. Which requirements are still open? Which architecture decisions are documented? Which dependencies exist between subsystems?

Today this knowledge is distributed across GitLab, DOORS, EA, PowerPoint and emails. itemis ANALYZE creates a central, queryable view of this distributed information: an organisation-wide engineering dashboard. Via MCP servers, AI assistants (Claude, Copilot etc.) can access this model data directly, answering questions like “Which requirements are affected by this change?” without manual effort.