FEW Automotive Group — glass connectors for OEM programs at VW, Porsche, and Ferrari — cut mass-production approval cycles from 2–3 weeks to 2–3 days after standing up a Smartsheet PMO across five plants on three continents. Head of Project Management Konstantin Gross told Smartsheet the same team now runs about 200 concurrent projects without adding headcount, up from roughly 100 under the old Excel-and-SharePoint stack.
That is not a generic Kanban win. Tier-1/2 automotive launches live inside APQP gates and end in PPAP sign-off: measurement reports, process docs, risk files, and sample approvals the customer must accept before revenue starts. A lost attachment or three competing status files can slip a launch by weeks—exactly the fog FEW left behind after the post-COVID surge in new parts and sites (~600 employees; plants in Europe, China, and Mexico).
Architecture is three views on one standard: portfolio for C-level, filtered project-manager boards, and day-to-day task/gate health—provisioned from Smartsheet Control Center blueprints so every new program inherits stage-gates, KPIs, and reporting hooks. Health is formula-driven from budget, timeline, and completion—not a PM’s opinion—and red status can escalate before the next steering meeting. Lighthouse Consultings’ April 2026 webinar recap walks the same live demo Gross ran in February.
Adoption started on the annoying PPAP email ping-pong, not the board deck, so users got work off their desks first. That pattern travels: Capgemini is pushing the same template-to-unit automation idea for aerospace/defense in SAP Production Engineering & Operations—one reusable project skeleton, infinite configuration-specific builds via parameter effectivity.
Elsewhere in project controls, Scientific Reports (July 2026) published Automated Conceptual Earned Value Management (ACEVM): machine-learning forecasts of budget, duration, variance, and risk at the conceptual stage—when traditional EVM has no actuals and can only draw the planned-value curve. Validated on 1,277 field-canal projects with ABC-optimized ensembles (LightGBM / Extremely Randomized Trees / AdaBoost), it is a research signal that PMO forecasting is moving earlier than first progress reports.
For N23D, the bar is the same as FEW’s lesson: one native Rust binary where schedule risk, APQP-class gates, and earned-value signals sit on the same digital thread as CAD/CAM/PLM—not a thirteenth spreadsheet pretending to be a PMO.
Sources/References
- Smartsheet — FEW Automotive Group customer story
- Lighthouse Consultings — Smartsheet PMO Automotive: FEW across three continents (April 21, 2026 webinar recap; webinar Feb 19, 2026)
- Smartsheet YouTube — FEW Automotive Group relies on Smartsheet (Feb 23, 2026)
- Scientific Reports — Automated conceptual earned value management (published July 25, 2026; DOI 10.1038/s41598-026-61909-5)
- Capgemini — Automating unit-specific projects in SAP PEO
- N23D — PMO stack page