Ultra Maritime UK Enlists Jama Connect for Naval Systems Requirements Management
UK operation chooses Jama Connect for its ease-of-use and administration.
About Ultra Maritime UK
Founded in 1944 and acquired in 2021 by Advent International
Over 2,300 employees across fifteen locations worldwide
Premier provider of undersea warfare systems, products, and solutions to US, UK, Canada, Australia, and allied navies worldwide.
CUSTOMER STORY OVERVIEW
This customer story is about Ultra Maritime UK, a division of Ultra Maritime, which develops equipment for surface, subsurface, and unmanned platforms, including acoustic and sonar systems and torpedo defense and radar sensor solutions. Customers include the Royal Navy of the UK, the U.S. Navy, the Royal Canadian Navy, the Royal Australian Navy, and the Indian Navy.
Since the Ultra Group’s acquisition by U.S. private equity firm Advent International in 2021, Ultra Maritime has operated as an integrated company with lines of business headquartered in the USA, UK, Canada, and Australia, responsible for developing both worldwide and localized solutions.
Ultra Maritime UK’s products and solutions must adhere to the highest quality, security, and safety standard,s including ISO 9001-2015, ISO 14001:2015, ISO/IEC 27001:2013, and ISO 45001:2018. In addition, the products must satisfy customer requirements and regional naval standards, including U.S. DoD/MIL-STD and UK MOD DStan.
Challenges
Enabling collaborative remote working on requirements
Managing both project and product requirements effectively
Becoming more product-focused to balance global and local requirements
Evaluation Criteria
Intuitive user interface for quick adoption
Low administrative overhead
Support for reuse of requirements and test evidence
Outcomes
Consistency across projects
Business mandatory requirements tool for all new projects
Quick user adoption with minimal training
Easy tracking of progress with dashboards and standardization
Reduced risk with pre-built standardized project structures
Easy management of large numbers of objects and changes
Easy initiation and completion of reviews to action items sooner in development
After years of managing project requirements with IBM® DOORS® Classic, these challenges drove Ultra Maritime UK to find a user-friendly collaborative tool that would enable them to increase their requirements management effectiveness and deliver projects faster.
Enabling collaborative remote working on requirements
Managing both project and product requirements effectively
Becoming more product-focused to balance global and local requirements
EVALUATION CRITERIA
Ultra Maritime UK identified several requirements management tools as potential replacements for DOORS Classic, including Jama Connect, which a member of the engineering team suggested. They then established criteria to be used for the evaluation.
Intuitive user interface for quick adoption
Low administrative overhead
Integrable with development and test software tools
Support for reuse of requirements and test evidence
First, a top priority was for the new solution to have a modern, intuitive user experience for teams to get up and running quickly with their new projects. They needed software that people would want to work in. Otherwise, people might opt out of using the tool and work in disparate documents, which would introduce risk, impede productivity, and hamper efficiency. Second, it would need to have low administrative overhead that did not require team members to become full-time administrators. Third, it would need to be integrable with development and test software tools from different vendors. Fourth, it would need to support the reuse of requirements and test evidence from past development programs when starting new products or projects.
During the evaluation process, Jama Connect stood out from the competition as the solution that would best meet the company’s needs. “Looking at all the features, the user’s ease of use, and the low level of administrative time required, Jama Connect came out on top compared to the other tools reviewed,” says the Senior Systems Engineer.
In its search for a modern solution that would be quickly adopted, Ultra Maritime UK found that Jama Connect’s intuitive user experience made adoption extremely easy for engineers to get started managing requirements and test evidence more efficiently and intelligently. Tracking and finding information quickly and easily was achievable with Jama Connect’s powerful filtering and the ability to add hyperlinks to any architectural elements, requirements, test items or other objects. In addition, the ability to create a Definitions database and Glossary in Jama Connect was particularly useful for getting everyone informed and up-to-speed about projects. “Jama Connect has a highly intuitive user interface and allows for engineers to quickly and easily become accustomed to using it,” says the Senior Systems Engineer.
Having a simple and quick way for systems engineers to initiate reviews and for stakeholders to complete their reviews in a timely manner was a key area where Jama Connect’s Review Center led the way. The fact that reviewers were not required to be licensed as full-time users made Jama Connect more attractive. “Jama Connect certainly makes it much easier to initiate and manage reviews and be aware of progress through them,” says the System Design Authority and Functional Lead.
“Jama Connect proved to be extremely useful for making sure that we’ve got complete coverage and traceability of a given set of artifacts to see which ones have or haven’t reached the approved step. This helps ensure we haven’t missed any anomalies such as system requirements missing verification cases to avoid rework,” says the System Design Authority and Functional Lead.
Support for multiple IDs for the same object in Jama Connect made it easy to identify opportunities for reuse of older product requirements and test evidence for new products to efficiently manage shared elements of core and variant products. “The ability to identify, distinguish, and reuse global requirements across products and projects to reduce development time and cost is a strength of Jama Connect,” says the System Design Authority and Functional Lead.
In addition to product capabilities, team expertise, and training resources provided during the evaluation demonstrated that Jama Software would be a good fit as a partner for Ultra Maritime UK. “We were impressed by Jama Software’s responsiveness to our questions and the online training, forums, and support available to our team,” says the System Design Authority and Functional Lead.
Jama Connect® Attains Level 2 TISAX Certification from TÜV SÜD
Jama Software, the industry’s leading requirements management and traceability solution provider, announced that it has achieved Level 2 Trusted Information Security Assessment Exchange (TISAX) certification from TÜV SÜD. TISAX is a security standard created by the German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA).
Jama Connect is now the only requirements management application that is both TISAX and SOC 2 certified
This achievement underscores Jama Software’s unwavering commitment to information security and data protection. TISAX certification is a critical benchmark for meeting the stringent security requirements of German OEMs and their global supply chains, ensuring that sensitive customer and product data is handled with the highest standards of confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
For our customers, this certification unequivocally demonstrates that Jama Software’s solutions and processes embody the highest standards of information security. It empowers organizations to meet stringent compliance requirements, simplifies and accelerates procurement processes, and fortifies trust in an era of increasingly complex regulatory demands and cyber threats. With this certification, customers gain not just confidence but a decisive edge in addressing their most critical security challenges.
“Jama Software is committed to enabling the highest levels of security for our customers. In support of our rapid growth in the automotive sector, we have added TISAX certification to complement our market leading SOC 2 certified application,” said Neil Stroud, General Manager Automotive & Semiconductor, Jama Software.
Jama Software is focused on maximizing innovation success in multidisciplinary engineering organizations. Numerous firsts for humanity in fields such as fuel cells, electrification, space, software-defined vehicles, surgical robotics, and more all rely on Jama Connect requirements management software to minimize the risk of defects, rework, cost overruns, and recalls. Using Jama Connect, engineering organizations can now intelligently manage the development process by leveraging Live Traceability™ across best-of-breed tools to measurably improve outcomes. Our rapidly growing customer base spans the automotive, medical device, life sciences, semiconductor, aerospace & defense, industrial manufacturing, consumer electronics, financial services, and insurance industries.
Simplify Airborne Systems Lifecycle Milestones with Categories
Gain Clarity, Reduce Risks, and Stay Compliant.
Struggling to keep track of deliverables across complex aerospace projects? You’re not alone. Managing deadlines and milestones often feels like navigating a maze of documents, spreadsheets, and shifting priorities.
In this webinar, you’ll discover how Jama Connect®’s Categories feature can bring order to your milestones, improve transparency, and align deliverables with key compliance standards like ARP4754.
What You’ll Learn:
How to Enable Categories: Simplify system development milestone tracking from start to finish.
Clarity on Deadlines: Learn how to make engineering deadlines easier to understand and act on.
Improving On-Time Performance: Organize milestone deliverables and optimize workflows to avoid delays.
Compliance Alignment: Map development milestones to standards such as ARP4754 with ease.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Patrick Knowles: I’m Patrick Knowles. It’s great to meet all of you. Today, we are going to be looking at simplifying airborne systems, specifically lifecycle milestones, by using Categories in Jama Connect. As I mentioned, my name is Patrick Knowles. I’m a senior solutions consultant here. And it’s just a pleasure to work with y’all. I’m in our aerospace and defense vertical, so my expertise comes from that within the industry. And now I’m happy to be sharing that with you all as I work through consulting, as well as webinars. Today’s agenda, we’re going to tackle really the core problem, the complex challenge of milestone deliveries. From there, I’m going to introduce this category’s functionality and features to all of you. If it’s something you’re familiar with, this will be a breeze. If it’s something new to you, I hope this is a great introduction to how it works.
Then we’ll talk about how you categorize information specifically with some best practices. So, for even those who are used to using Categories, this should be a refreshing little bit with maybe some new tricks that you can utilize. And then finally, we’re going to talk about deploying this to your collaborative teams, which is really critical. Because if the data’s Categorized on day one and then the data changes or new data comes in, your teams are going to need to know how to manage this, how to look at the information. And it’s going to help solve that complex challenge of milestone delivery and some of the issues that we’re going to talk about there.
So, this complex challenge, deadlines, and stress. There’s data everywhere. It’s disconnected, it’s disparate, it’s annoying. That’s the core root problem here. But to elaborate on it, engineering in the digital age can feel like a maze. There’s sometimes a lack of top-down visibility to deliverables. So, if you’re a program manager or a lead systems engineer or a chief engineer, you might struggle to see all the work that your teams are doing. And sometimes there’s a lack of bottom-up visibility to the milestone. So, if you’re an engineer, you might not know about what milestone comes next, what’s due at that milestone. A lot of the time, that information is on a Word document or an Excel sheet, or maybe a Confluence page at best, where it’s listing out everything that’s due, but it doesn’t inherently connect to anything that is due and what those exact bits of information on.
And that leads to some unclear methods for contributing. How do I, as an engineer, ensure that we’re going to meet this deadline? I know what I see on my scrum board or I see from my manager, or whatever it might be, but maybe at the end of the day I don’t really understand exactly how my little bit of data is getting into that greater picture for this delivery to our customer or to our internal stakeholders. And then, of course, the common issue is always that data is disconnected, but that’s what Jama Connect is here to help with. We’re here to help you guide through that maze and to connect your data together to solve these key issues.
So, the risky scenario here is that your data is disconnected from a milestone, and that maybe you forget to deliver a certain part of the data, or you deliver outdated bits of data, or anything else that might happen there. And it’s pretty common across engineering. It doesn’t really matter where you work, there’s always this struggle to get everything ready from pencils down to delivery or whatever it might be. There are bigger views related to all of this work. There are stakeholders, customers, and, of course, the program leaders who need to see this information. And they need to see the most up-to-date, correct information. And without a clear way to connect your requirements specifically, because that’s what we’re going to mostly talk about here, is requirements. But without a really clear way to connect your requirements to your milestones or the rest of your data to milestones, you run the risk of simply leaving things behind.
Knowles: So, how can Jama Connect help? Well, the specific use case we’re going to talk about today is enabling our Categories functionality in the tool. And we’re going to line it up with milestones from regulatory documents. Specifically, this example is going to be based on ARP4754B. However, if you are running the NASA systems engineering life cycle and you know the milestones in there, you could also line this up to that or any other number of product lifecycle milestones. We’re going to categorize data directly into things. And that’s going to help you really line it up to each of these listed items over there in the screenshot on the right. And then your members of the team are going to be able to filter, and view this data, and see it grow and add to it. And it’s going to be very transparent for them, how they’re connecting their information to the greater milestone.
With our foundation laid, there on what the problem is, I want to talk more about what Categories are. So, what exactly is a Category? Why do we believe this is a great option for you and the team to try and enable within your tool? Specifically, Categories have a similar feel to some other features within Jama Connect, like tags and pick lists. However, Categories win out overall with this specific use case for a number of reasons. First and foremost, Categories are admin-enabled and controlled, so your general user can’t populate a Category. They can assign information to a Category, but they can’t create new ones. Which means that, unlike tags, this is a kind of configuration managed by your admins. Pick lists are also configuration managed by your admins. However, they aren’t globally accessible to all item types. You’re going to have to create a field for every single pick list that you want assigned different item types.
Categories, however, can be globally applied to an entire project or to the whole instance of Jama Connect. That means that you don’t have to go and assign them to each of your item types. They’re going to connect to folders. They’re going to connect to texts. They’re going to connect with your specific requirement types, whatever it might be. And so, that’s an advantage that Categories have. Also, Categories can be available across multiple projects or just one specific project, which helps if you have a kind of multi-layered approach to your Jama Connect development of requirements. Finally, I’ll explain why not to use tags and pick lists. Tags, again, are creatable and by the user, and prone to error. If you type a capital letter in the wrong spot or put the wrong vowel in the wrong place, that’s going to be there in perpetuity, unless you have really strong tag cleanup processes.
And pick lists and multi-selects, you have to create it for each item type. You have to maintain the pick list. And then if an item type is introduced to a project, you’re going to have to re-add that pick list to it, and so on and so forth. So Categories is a little broader, but also just as controlled. And so, you’re able to kind of manage in a smoother way. So, how do you set up Categories? Well, you go to admin, Categories. And then over there on the far right of the screenshot, you’ll see enable Categories is turned on. It’s defaulted off for most instances, so make sure you turn it on first. From there, we’re going to set up all the Categories you see in front of you on the screenshot, as well as any number of other Category you may want to enable.
Knowles: Now, once you’ve got everything enabled, it’s all about how do you Categorize the information. So, we’re going to walk through some instructions, some best practices, and then we’ll do some demonstration, of course, here at the end of this section of the slides on how you do all this work. The first thing, like we mentioned, is enabling Categories. You do that through the admin. You assign things to either projects or global within your Jama Connect instance, and then you start utilizing them. One of our best practices here is to manage Categories through logical organizers, so folders, sets, components. That allows you to then click into the list view of that logical organizer and then assign all the Categories to the items within it. You don’t have to do this. This is just one of the more efficient ways, especially if you’re enabling an architecture-forward approach within your database. And of course, you can manage Categories in bulk, otherwise this whole explanation wouldn’t make much sense.
So, some of the tips, tricks, and best practices. Here, we’ve got the managing in bulk. And I’ll show you how to do that live. We’ll view categorized information in the exploratory via a filter, and so we’ve got to set up filters. Of course, those same filters can be exported or sent to reports, and then you can use multiple Categories on the same item. So, if one item is going to be delivered at the first milestone and you want to continue to deliver it at the next milestone, you simply add both Categories to it. And finally, you can always create baselines of everything filtered. So, these filters that we’re going to use to shrink down and narrow down the exploratory are also going to be very, very useful for baselining, for exporting, and for a number of other things.
So, now it’s time to demonstrate some of these best practices. The first things first is enabling Categories. As we discussed earlier, there’s this enable Categories button here on the far right. Once enabled, you’ll be able to add Categories with the add button here. Doing that is as simple as populating a single field with the information and hitting add. I, of course, have the whole system ddevelopment phase added already, and so I want to show you exactly what that looks like, how these things got nested underneath each other, and so on and so forth, by adding an eighth step. So, for today, the webinar phase is what we’re going to add to our development phases here. When we add, it’s going to actually add it at the top level. And so, then we need to drag it down into the system development phase.
We are going to use the move functionality here, as that’s the best practice in this scenario, where the copy Category functionality is better for using this for variant management. Now you can see that the webinar phase has been added to the system development phases. And you can also see that the system development phase is a project Category. This was done by managing access here on the right side, where you can pick the specific projects you’d like this Category to be assigned to. Or if this is something you want globally accessible, you can use the globally accessible button here. When you hit that, you’ll see that it turns orange and has a globe, instead of the project specific icon that you saw originally.
Now let’s look at how we categorize information within the tool. Our screenshots were showing this functions portion of this project, and so we’re going to dive into that to continue the continuity of this example. This specific set here, we’ll view the details of it, and we’ll simply scroll down and manage Categories. So, if we wanted to add that eight system development phase, webinar phase, we’ll simply select it, and click add and it will be added to this set of information. From there, we can bulk edit everything underneath the set by selecting all the items and clicking manage Categories. Same pop-up shows up, and we’re able to add that eighth phase of the lifecycle.
Now, this is really, really fantastic. If we want to go see everything in the eighth phase of the lifecycle, we can select the Categories feature over here. We can expand our system development phase and select webinar phase, where we see the items that were added there, including the set up here, and are able to kind of view this information in the list view. Now, if we wanted to see this in the explorer, we would go to filters and we’re just going to rely on this pre-built one here. And we’re going to right click apply filter to explorer. This is going to show us the information in a more succinct way. And we’ll talk more about this as we go on.
Knowles: Now that we’ve looked at how to enable Categories, we want to talk about how we develop this and deploy this data and these Categories for your collaborative team. I talked a little bit about this and showed you these exact steps here to narrow down your explorer tree, but what really is the benefit here? Well, you can set up a simple filter that’s based on the Category itself and right-click apply that filter to the explorer. This lets teams see just the information they need to care about coming up, especially if your sets, components, and folders are all categorized. This will show a team that, hey, we need to make sure all of the aircraft functions are populated for this coming milestone, because that set is there. Same with the aircraft validations, the requirements, and the plans and assessments.
Each of those logical organizers are categorized, showing the team this is something that is due at the upcoming milestone. The team then will populate information underneath that and they will categorize those items as well to bring them into the overall filter. Now, public filters are just kind of one of the ways we want to see this deployed to the team. We also need to demonstrate to the team how do you bookmark the filters, and how do you even manage Categories in general? So, in the next step here, I’m going to demonstrate managing Categories for single items, as well as a couple other little nuances within the tool that the teams will need to understand as they go ahead and use this in the deployed environment.
When deploying this information to the teams, it’s really critical that you’ve set your filters to be public. A quick way to note if something is public is if it’s got the asterisk next to the name here. You can always right-click and edit your filter and click the make public, and that will denote that it is public to all users using this project. Once your filters are all built out, you’re going to have them there. You’re going to teach your users exactly how to use them, of course, with the apply filter to explore. But also, if they need to send these for a review and get signatures on them or add a baseline, there’s also these features available to them.
And of course, bookmarking is really, really critical. Without it bookmarked, you can see I’m now missing phase one, so I have to go to all, and then go find phase one, and add it to my bookmarks and it’ll now show up in my bookmarked section here. Users most of the time are going to be adding new items to the tool. And so, if we add a new item here, we’re going to populate this new item, a new item for webinar. And that’s going to be our example item here to show that once we’ve saved it, this is when we get to add the Categories. It’s not a field that’s available directly when editing a brand new item. It shows up after the fact here down at the bottom with the managed Categories button.
You’ll then grab the applicable Categories that you want to add to this item, save it, and you’ll see them here. This helps, and it automatically adds things to the filter. You’ll see here that we’ve gone up in the number of items, and our new item for the webinar right here is now part of the filter automatically. Additionally, you can show your users that they can come directly here in the category section to see the same information, just without the filter and without some of those right-click functionalities that you get to see when you’re in the filter section. It’s been fantastic to work with you all today and show off these features in the tool.
Jama Connect Named as the 2025 TrustRadius Top Rated Winner in Requirements Management
We are thrilled to announce that Jama Connecthas been honored as a 2025 TrustRadius Top Rated Award winner in the “Requirements Management” category! This recognition underscores our commitment to delivering industry-leading tools that empower teams to efficiently manage requirements and associated processes. But what makes this achievement particularly meaningful is that this award is based entirely on the candid feedback of those who use Jama Connect in real-world scenarios.
Why the TrustRadius Top Rated Award Matters
The TrustRadius Top Rated Awards are among the most trusted accolades in the B2B technology space. Unlike analyst-driven awards, these honors are determined exclusively by verified customer reviews. To win, products must meet strict criteria, including a high volume of positive reviews, consistent high ratings, and a strong trScore, which evaluates reviews for quality, recency, and depth.
Earning this recognition signifies that Jama Connect excels in meeting the needs of our users, as acknowledged by the very people who rely on our solution to deliver remarkable outcomes.
Reflecting on the Value of Jama Connect
Jama Connect is a trusted partner for teams navigating complex development projects across industries. Whether it’s supporting product innovation in aerospace, ensuring compliance in highly regulated medical fields, or improving efficiency in agile software development, Jama Connect provides the tools necessary for collaboration, traceability, and success.
Here’s what some of our customers have to say about their experience:
“Jama Connect has the best UI compared to DOORS, Codebeamer, and [PTC Integrity]. It’s the clearest to use with the best usability. For example, making traces between requirements is as straightforward as clicking a button. The trace matrix view is highly configurable to show anything you need.” (Verified User, Medical Device Company)
“We are using Jama Connect to be more than just a requirements management tool – we are using Jama Connect as the single source of truth to contain not just the requirements, but also the why and how the system is the way it is. It helps us engage stakeholders, both junior and senior, due to its user-friendly interface.” (Chris Armstrong, Lead Systems Engineer, JFD)
“We use Jama [Connect] for centralized requirements administration of sector-wide projects and development. The intuitive review module and quick-marking features make managing requirements seamless.” (Verified Professional, Oil & Energy Company)
At Jama Software, we consider user feedback to be a critical component of our development process. We consistently listen to customers and translate their insights into actionable improvements. One reviewer highlighted this commitment, stating:
“We pretty much use it (Jama Connect) for the entire software development lifecycle and utilize its review/approval and baselining system for our controlled documents.”
Our agility and dedication to continuous improvement help ensure that Jama Connect remains a market leader to support evolving customer needs.
Why Organizations Choose Jama Connect
What differentiates Jama Connect is not just its robust features but the way it revolutionizes how teams manage the product lifecycle. By bringing stakeholders together and enabling clear, traceable processes, we make it easy for organizations to focus on outcomes, even in the most challenging and regulated environments. Key benefits include:
Live Traceability™: A hallmark of Jama Connect, this feature enables teams to maintain real-time visibility into the interconnections between requirements, decisions, and test cases, ensuring that everyone is working with up-to-date information.
Streamlined Regulatory Compliance: Simplify alignment with frameworks like ISO 26262 and FDA 21 CFR Part 11 using Jama Connect’s built-in templates and automated tracking.
Collaboration at Scale: Empower distributed teams with tools like stakeholder commenting, intuitive workflows, and export functionality to foster engagement and decision-making.
“The export tools to PDF and Word for our regulatory needs have saved us a ton of time. We use Jama Connect for risk management, validation, and planning. It’s well organized and helps streamline collaboration across teams.”
Winning the 2025 TrustRadius Top Rated Award inspires us to continue innovating and elevating the Jama Connect experience. We are actively working on updates that incorporate more automation, deeper analytics, and enhanced user experiences, helping customers tackle emerging challenges with efficiency and confidence.
We’re always listening to your feedback and using it to make Jama Connect even better. Our goal is to keep evolving alongside your needs and ensure it stays the go-to tool for requirements management.
Experience the Future of Requirements Management
This recognition solidifies why thousands of professionals trust Jama Connect to guide their projects to success. If you haven’t yet discovered what sets our platform apart, now is the time.
Whether you’re seeking to improve compliance, streamline product development, or simplify communication across teams, Jama Connect has the solution you need.
A Heartfelt Thank You
To our incredible community of users, thank you for making this milestone possible. Your trust and feedback inspire us to push boundaries and continue delivering tools that help your teams thrive. This achievement is as much yours as it is ours, and we look forward to supporting you for years to come.
Self-Hosted and Cloud: Flexible Deployment Options for Your Requirements Management with Jama Software
Efficient requirements management is vital for the success of any organization, especially in industries like aerospace, defense, and government, where compliance, security, and accuracy are paramount. Jama Software provides a sophisticated and adaptable requirements management solution, ensuring that your teams stay ahead in competitive and highly regulated fields.
But did you know that Jama Connect® isn’t only available as a cloud solution? Depending on your organization’s unique needs, you can also choose a self-hosted deployment option. This flexibility is the perfect answer for industries requiring strict data sovereignty, air-gapped environments, or regulatory compliance.
While Jama Connect is well-known for our cloud deployment option, we actually originated as a self-hosted product more than twenty years ago. And two decades later, we remain committed to delivering the best platform and customer experience for our self-hosted and cloud customers.
Curious about which deployment option best suits your business? This post will break down when to choose Jama Connect Cloud versus the self-hosted deployment. We’ll also answer frequently asked questions to help you make informed decisions.
When to Choose Jama Software Cloud vs. Self-Hosted
Jama Connect Cloud and Jama Connect Self-Hosted both empower effective requirements management. However, certain use cases demand one option over the other.
Jama Connect Cloud
Best for organizations that value ease of deployment, automatic updates, and seamless access. Key benefits include:
Automatic Updates and Maintenance: Benefit from the latest features and security enhancements without manual effort.
Anywhere, Anytime Access: Teams can access data on-demand, enabling global collaboration without roadblocks.
Cost Efficiency: Eliminate the need for large IT infrastructure spendings; we handle hosting for you.
Geographically Distributed Hosting: To ensure reliability and security, Jama Software hosts data in highly secure and strategic cloud locations. For customers in the US, we host data in Oregon, with a backup in Ohio. For EMEA customers, data will not leave the EU in line with GDPR. Two copies of the data is hosted in Ireland, with a backup in Germany. Jama Connect add-ons – Jama Connect Interchange™ and Jama Connect Advisor™ – can also be hosted in the US or EU.
Ideal for industries like tech startups, mid-sized enterprises, and companies prioritizing agility and scalability in requirements management.
Jama Connect Self-Hosted
Organizations working in highly regulated industries often need tighter control over their data. This deployment ensures robust security and customization on your own infrastructure. Benefits include:
Data Sovereignty: Maintain control of sensitive data and ensure compliance with local regulations.
Air-Gapped Environments: Operate without internet connectivity, ideal for sectors like aerospace and defense that mandate offline solutions.
Regulatory Compliance: Handle development processes under strict standards like ITAR, ECJU, and EAR.
Ideal for industries such as government, aerospace, and defense, where security and compliance are non-negotiable.
Jama Connect Deployment Options
Jama Connect ensures that your needs are met, whether you lean toward cloud solutions or prefer in-house deployment. Here’s how Jama Connect offers robust flexibility in deployment:
Cloud Deployment
Our cloud-based SaaS solution takes the burden of infrastructure management off your shoulders. It ensures faster setup, seamless updates, and scalability as your teams grow. Collaborate easily across distributed teams while we manage the heavy lifting of security and operational efficiency.
Self-Hosted Deployment
Need control down to the last detail? Self-host Jama Connect within your IT infrastructure. This option provides your team with complete autonomy over data, operational configuration, and security measures. Your infrastructure, your rules.
Do you have questions about configuring a self-hosted deployment? Our experts are here to help. Schedule a consultation to explore the best option for your business.
FAQ: Common Questions About Jama Software Deployment Options
Still not sure which deployment is right for you? Below are answers to some frequently asked questions.
Is switching between Jama Connect Cloud and Self-Hosted possible?
Yes, we offer migration support to ensure your data transitions smoothly between deployment types when upgrading or restructuring operations.
Do both deployments support compliance with industry standards?
Absolutely! Whether cloud-based or on-premises, Jama Connect supports compliance with requirements like ISO 26262, DO-178C, DO-254, and other critical regulatory standards. Your choice of deployment will not limit compliance functionality.
What level of IT support is required for the self-hosted deployment?
Self-hosted deployments require your organization to manage backups, updates, and server maintenance. However, we provide technical guidance to your IT teams to ensure a smooth setup.
Does the cloud option support multi-location teams?
Yes! With the cloud deployment, all team members, regardless of their geographic location, can work collaboratively without latency or access issues.
What security measures are in place for both deployment options?
For Self-Hosted: You’ll adhere to your internal security protocols (including CMMC security requirements) and configurations.
Jama Software Provides a Smarter Approach to Requirements Management
When it comes to requirements management, there’s no “one-size-fits-all.” Jama Connect adapts to your unique organizational needs, whether you need a hands-off cloud solution or an air-gapped, team-managed infrastructure.
Experience seamless collaboration, reduce compliance risks, and ensure stakeholder alignment across your organization with Jama Software. Are you ready to optimize your requirements management process?
Explore our deployment options and see how Jama Connect aligns with your vision of compliance, security, and efficiency.
Improve Traceability and Enhance Coverage with Live Trace Explorer™
Engineering teams today face growing challenges in maintaining requirement coverage, managing risks, and making informed, data-driven decisions, all while working with siloed tools and tight deadlines. Simply meeting the minimum traceability requirements isn’t enough to stay competitive.
Live Trace Explorer™ helps teams visualize end-to-end trace relationships, identify gaps, validate coverage, and ensure quality in real time. With advanced filtering capabilities, you can focus on what matters most to keep your projects on track, compliant, and aligned with traceability best practices.
In this session, host Francis Trudeau will show you how Live Trace Explorer enables engineering teams to visualize trace relationships, validate coverage, pinpoint gaps, and ensure quality, all in real-time. You’ll also learn how advanced filtering capabilities help you focus on what matters most, while aligning your traceability practices with industry best practices.
What You’ll Learn:
The vision behind Live Trace Explorer and its evolution
How to use filtering to enhance clarity, control, and support traceability best practices
Strategies for leveraging traceability to manage risk and ensure compliance
This is your chance to gain actionable insights, contribute to the evolution of traceability tools, and stay ahead in managing risk and compliance.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Francis Trudeau: My name is Francis Trudeau, and I’m a Product Manager at Jama Software. I’m also a curious Scout leader who thrives in the great outdoors and enjoys a good story. Now, picture me as a hiker standing at the foot of a mountain, and that mountain represents the path of development, the climb towards a vision that guides our every step. My specific role is to give you a clearer, elevated view, helping you navigate your projects from start to finish, measuring progress, and managing risks along the way. The summit of the mountain represents that ideal, managing the development process through data. In other words, making decisions based on available information, think metrics, graphics, trend lines, dashboards, etc. But like any true vision, it’s not just a destination. It’s a challenge. Can we even get there? Is there a taller peak hidden behind this one? That mystery is part of the adventure.
In today’s webinar, I invite you to tag along on this journey. I’ll show you the progress we’ve made so far, offer a glimpse of the path ahead and share how you can contribute to making this vision a reality. So we are set for a journey, and our first milestone along the way is the Live Trace Explorer, which is essentially a visual dynamic representation of the V-Model for evaluating coverage, addressing gaps and managing associated risks. Focusing on the diagram, each tile represents a component or set connected with trace paths. These paths are gray if there are no relationships between the items in adjacent tiles and they turn green and red to indicate the number of valid or suspect relationships between those tiles.
On the right side, the verifications and validations branch shows the number of test cases linked to items within the container on its left no matter where they appear in the project. At the bottom of each tile, you’ll find a metric representing the ratio of those test cases included in a test plan.
On the requirements side, the top part of each tile displays stats including the number of items by type and any open conversations. In the bottom half, you’ll find coverage metrics, essentially the ratio of existing relationships to expected ones as defined by the Traceability Information Model.
Overall, the Life Trace Explorer is meant to expose the coverage completeness as the ratio of existing over expected relationships and a measure of the validity of relationships by exposing a metric of suspect relationships between related items included in two adjacent tiles. By creating a diagram for a simple project, one can easily get a big picture of a project, spot gaps, and keep track of progress. Beautiful, isn’t it? Are we there yet?
Well, not quite. As we catch our breath and take in the view, it becomes clear that the view, while impressive, is a little foggy. We’ve reached a breathtaking lookout. The elevated view is structured, informative, even beautiful, but for many of the customers we’ve consulted, the information still feels cloudy. Yes, the coverage percentage and suspect indicators are valuable. They give us a sense of direction, but there’s a key limitation. The Life Trace Explorer currently measures everything without distinction. In real projects, not every item should count towards coverage. To get a metric that truly reflects reality, we need the ability to focus, to filter in only the relevant items and filter out the noise. Only then can we sharpen the view and get a clearer, more meaningful measure of completeness.
Trudeau: Let’s take a look at a few real examples customers have shared with us. The first one is about filtering out items that shouldn’t be included in coverage. For instance, many teams keep items in their project that were originally considered but later rejected. They’re still useful for historical context, but they don’t need to be part of the coverage calculation. The same goes for draft items. They’re still in progress and not ready to be measured yet.
The second example is about narrowing the scope. Sometimes teams want to measure coverage or track suspect links only for a specific slice of the project. A good example is when using prioritization methods like MoSCoW, where a team may only want to focus on must-have items.
Another example is when tailoring views for different stakeholders, say admins, primary users, or partners, and only showing what’s relevant to each group. Now, Jama Connect® is highly configurable, so these are just a few common examples. What matters here is that the filtering we’ve added to the Live Trace Explorer works with any picklist field and only picklists for now. So with that in mind, let’s jump into Jama Connect and see how it works.
Here we are in the ACME demo project. The Traceability Information Model or TIM flows simply from left to right, starting with higher-level needs, then moving down to requirements and designs. Each of these is validated and verified by test items. It’s a straightforward setup that follows the logic of the V-Model.
To begin, we’ll generate a diagram for the entire project and open the Trace Score™ calculator so we can keep track of the metrics used in the calculation. Our first filter will focus on the design items. Right now, we have three designs, and the coverage is showing 66%. Let’s take a closer look. In our project, each design has a status chosen from a picklist: draft under review, approved or rejected. One of them is currently marked as rejected. We’re going to apply a filter to ignore rejected designs. To do this, open the configuration settings, open the configuration applied to the specification tiles, click the funnel icon to set the filter, set the rule using the picklist field for design status, in the second drop-down choose is not equal to, then select rejected, set the filter, and apply. We now have two items instead of three. Coverage for the items that matter is 100%, and the Trace Score is updated accordingly. Also, notice the funnel icon. It shows that a filter is now applied to this item type in this tile.
Next, let’s move to the requirements. At ACME, we use the MoSCoW method to prioritize them. Suppose we want to focus only on the must-have items. We’d apply a similar filter as we did for designs. Here we have four requirement items, but only one is marked as must. Back in the diagram, we follow the same steps to set the filter. Before I hit apply, you can probably guess the item count will drop to one, but watch what happens with the suspect and coverage metrics. We now notice a clear coverage gap with the designs. On the verification side, test cases are linked, but they’re not included in a test plan yet. As for the suspects, there are three needs pointing to this must requirement, and one of those needs has changed, which makes the relationship suspect.
For our last example, let’s look at those needs. Each one is tagged with one or more user groups. Let’s say we only want to measure the needs relevant to partners. We go back to the configuration panel. Since this is a multi-select picklist, our rule options are contains and does not contain. We choose the content and select a partner. Before I hit apply, pay attention to the suspect links, the test metrics, and open conversations. See that all these related metrics are refreshed to only consider information from filtered items.
Trudeau: To wrap up, this configured filtered diagram gives us a Trace Score specifically for the partner’s needs, focusing on must requirements and excluding rejected designs. Finally, we can save this configuration, for example, as ACME for Partner, so we can return to it later.
That was a quick tour of how Live Trace Explorer filtering works, a simple, flexible way to sharpen your focus and configure what you actually want to measure. Now let’s talk about what’s next. Filters will be available to all cloud customers in Jama Connect 9.24 scheduled for release in the coming weeks. In July, Live Trace Explorer will be part of our customer-validated cloud rollout, and note that this version is based on Jama Connect 9.22, so filters won’t be included in that CBC release. For self-hosted customers, Live Trace Explorer with filtering will be available later this fall. Our team remains fully dedicated to the future development of Live Trace Explorer, and this includes further refinements on filters, specifically developing nested filters, supporting and or clauses for more than one filtering rule. Remember in the demo when I excluded rejected designs, what if I wanted to exclude draft or rejected designs? The nested filters will allow for this sort of logic.
Beyond these near-term improvements, we are exploring ideas inspired by customer feedback, ways to make Live Trace Explorer even more configurable and actionable. Driving action is about clicking a metric to drill into a filtered trace view, showing only items with missing coverage, suspect links or open conversations. Tailoring is about tailoring the diagram layout itself, hiding irrelevant tiles or reordering them for clarity or to reveal suspect status between different locations. We’re also looking beyond the diagram towards future metrics that can help you manage your projects with confidence.
When the team brainstormed avenues for the Live Trace Explorer, many possible metrics were envisioned. Trend lines over time to tell the story of your project and identify bottlenecks. Coverage gaps per item owner to visualize specific user. What about an item status breakdown? Is this worth monitoring? And what do you think of the relationship health for visualizing change and rework? Is a measure of aging for suspects interesting? What about test execution status? Not just test coverage? These are just a few examples, and of course, we’re always looking for more ideas, but the metrics that really matter are the ones aligned with your goals. I guess the question is, what do you want to manage? What do you want to measure?
Jama Connect is already helping teams bridge requirements and testing, but we want to support you further with insights that reflect your priorities, your goals, and your way of working, so here’s my invitation. Join us in this journey. If the idea of managing the development process through data resonates with you, if you’re excited about defining and evolving the right metrics, if you want a map and compass of your mountain climb, a way to see not just where you are but where you’re going, then let’s keep the conversation going. Reach out to your customer success manager, ask to connect with product management, and help shape the future of Live Trace Explorer and the tools that power your work.
Overcome complexity in consumer electronics development without compromising quality.
In the race to bring innovative consumer electronics to market, even small delays can lead to lost revenue, missed windows, and a shrinking competitive edge. At the same time, fast-changing regulations, global supply chains, and growing demands around cybersecurity, sustainability, and safety are making development more challenging than ever.
In this webinar recap blog, join Jama Software experts Patrick Garman and Yannick Selg for a practical discussion on how to integrate compliance into your development workflow in order to achieve full traceability, streamline variant management, and speed up time to market.
What You’ll Learn
Implement compliance as part of a unified workflow for a single source of truth
Ensure end-to-end traceability, connecting supply chain inputs to requirements
Manage product variants seamlessly with advanced reuse strategies
Scale traceability across your entire digital thread for improved alignment
Patrick Garman: Hi, everyone, and welcome. Thank you for joining us for today’s session. Agile, Compliant, Competitive: Fast-Tracking Consumer Electronics Innovation. I’m Patrick Garman, and I manage professional solutions for consumer electronics here at Jama Software. I’m excited to be joined today by my colleague Yannick Selg, one of our Senior Solutions Architects. Together, we’ll explore what it takes to succeed in the fast-paced, high-stakes world of consumer electronics development.
The consumer electronics industry is one of the most dynamic out there, driven by innovation, defined by short lifecycles, and shaped by intense competition. A must-have device today can become obsolete in a matter of months. This creates enormous pressure, not just to innovate but to deliver quickly and get it right the first time. And development is no longer linear, it’s fast-paced, global, and layered. And while speed to market is essential, navigating the increasingly complex regulatory environment is just as critical. The bar for compliance isn’t just higher, it’s shifting under our feet.
So, here’s how we’re going to break this down today. First, we’ll explore how rapid innovation is reshaping development cycles and how teams can keep up without burning out. Then we’ll examine the regulatory landscape and what it takes to build compliance into your development process from the start. Next, we’ll look at the challenge of maintaining quality and compliance while accelerating delivery. We’ll share practical strategies and tools to help your teams move faster without compromising rigor, including how Jama Connect® supports modular design, regulatory traceability, and smarter collaboration.
Finally, Yannick will provide a live demo of Jama Connect, showing how our platform streamlines and accelerates your product development process without sacrificing quality. If there’s one message to take away today, it’s this. Innovation is not just about what’s new. It’s about navigating complexity with confidence. Developing innovative consumer electronics is difficult. Even under the best conditions, these products are incredibly complex. Even in a stable environment, managing requirements across disciplines, hardware, software, UX, compliance is challenging. But in reality, we’re rarely working in a stable environment. We are constantly navigating shifting market trends, emerging technologies, global supply chain fluctuations and evolving regulations. Add in social and geopolitical disruptions and it’s no surprise that teams often find themselves tripping over their own processes, not due to a lack of talent or effort but because the complexity outpaces the tools they’re using to manage it.
Garman: Here’s what we often hear from customers before they adopt Jama Connect. Things like, “We keep building the wrong thing because requirements weren’t clear or accessible,” or, “Engineering is out of sync with compliance,” or, “We didn’t realize we missed a requirement until testing, or worse, after launch.” Sound familiar? These are not just anecdotes, these are measurable pain points. 62% of companies have been reprimanded or fined by regulatory agencies. 83% of design teams cite immature requirements management as the root cause of project failures. And roughly one-third of a typical product development budget is spent on unplanned work. Things like rework, defect resolution, or scrambling to address gaps that could have been caught earlier. And here’s the bottom line. A six-month delay can result in a 33% loss in potential revenue.
That’s not just a product issue; that’s a business issue. The takeaway is clear. Without a structured collaborative requirements management approach, you’re not just risking quality, you’re risking profitability, compliance, and your speed to market.
Let’s start with the simple truth. Speed matters. If you’re late to market even by a few months, you’ve already lost ground, lost revenue, lost mindshare, and lost relevance. But here’s the challenge. Today’s breakthrough is tomorrow’s baseline. Innovation doesn’t slow down. The pressure to stay ahead pushes teams to take risks and move fast. But fast alone is not enough. Today’s development isn’t clean or consequential. It’s global, concurrent and complex. Hardware might be built in one country, software in another with compliance teams spread across all time zones. All of that coordination has to happen in real time. Meanwhile, regulations might evolve mid-cycle. A product that met requirements at design freeze may fall out of compliance before it ships. That finish line keeps moving. So yes, fast is good, but flawless is better. Success means not just getting to market, but getting there with a product that meets expectations across the board; technical, legal and consumer. That’s what we’ll unpack throughout this session. How to balance agility with accuracy and move quickly without breaking things.
We’re developing products in a world where innovation is constant and accelerating. AI, automation, personalization, these aren’t high-end features anymore. They are expected. Devices are no longer isolated, they’re connected, adaptive and increasingly intelligent. This raises the bar and the complexity. Development cycles are now parallel, not sequential. Hardware, firmware, AI models, mobile apps, supplier planning, everything is happening at once and feeding into each other. The only way to manage this pace is with agile cross-functional workflows. Compatibility is another hurdle. Whether it’s Matter, Alexa, Google Home, your product must play nicely in a connected ecosystem. Standards like USBC don’t just reflect technical choices that reflect regulatory pressure and consumer expectations.
And it’s not just technology that’s shifting. The market itself is transforming. Boundaries between industries are disappearing. A fitness tracker is now a health monitor and a social device. Do self-driving cars belong to the automotive industry or consumer electronics? That blurring of categories brings new competition and new risk. Add to this geopolitical disruption, chip shortages, trade regulations. And you’re not just designing for a performance, you’re designing for resilience. The takeaway? Speed still wins, but only when it’s paired with flexibility. It’s time to stop asking how fast can we ship and start asking how well can we adapt? Of course, building great products is hard. Making them legal, safe and certifiable, even harder. Regulatory complexity isn’t just growing, it’s fragmenting. Every region brings a different rule book. Europe has CE Marking, RoHS, REACH and the WEEE Directive. And now, the Cyber Resilience Act and AI Act are adding new layers of cybersecurity and transparency expectations.
The U.S. is more decentralized. The FCC rules govern emissions. UL handles safety. And states like California are adding laws like CCPA that impact product labeling and data handling. China requires CCC certification, local testing, cybersecurity reviews, and strict data localization policies. And that’s just a few markets. Here’s the kicker. Even a minor design change like swapping out a chip can trigger retesting and recertification. That’s time, money, and launch risk. So, compliance is not a checklist, it’s a discipline that has to be embedded from the beginning. Get it right and you move confidently. Get it wrong and you risk delays, recalls, fines, or even exclusion from key markets. To be clear, in this industry, compliance is a product feature.
Garman: We’ve all heard the phrase “move fast and break things,” but in regulated high-stakes product development, that mindset can backfire. Yes, speed to market is important. Yes, regulatory compliance is non-negotiable. But getting there first with a buggy product, that’s a fast track to customer dissatisfaction and reputational damage. As this chart illustrates, the later a defect is found, the more expensive it is to fix, not just in dollars but in lost time and market opportunity. A defect that’s missed in integration testing might cost 40 times more to resolve in system testing. If it makes it to acceptance testing, that cost jumps to 110 times. And if the issue is discovered after launch, you’re not just paying in engineering hours, you’re paying in trust. That’s why verification and validation can’t be an afterthought. They must be built into every phase of development. And quality is not just about testing. It starts with the clarity and completeness of your requirements. Are your teams writing precise, actionable requirements? Do you have traceability across development artifacts to ensure nothing is missed? Do you have review stage gates with all stakeholders? That means bringing in legal, compliance, security and business teams early, even if you think they’ll just slow things down.
High-performing teams invest in both product quality and process quality because the cost of getting it wrong grows with every step forward. So, the question isn’t speed, compliance or quality, it’s how do we build all three into our process so that we can control complexity before it controls us. This means breaking down silos. Engineering, compliance, manufacturing, support, these teams can’t operate in isolation. They need shared visibility and synchronized workflows. Provide visibility and transparency early and you’ll discover what you don’t know much faster and avoid having to backtrack later when it’s more expensive. And reuse what works. You don’t have to start from scratch each time. You can reuse validated IP, swappable components with their requirements and even test cases to move faster without increasing risk.
Testing also has to evolve. Coverage gaps are the silent killers. Traceability from requirements to validation ensures you’re testing the right things and finding gaps before your customers do. And testing should be continuous, not a final step. Validation is part of development, not the end of it. The bottom line: speed without structure is guesswork. Speed with discipline is leadership. So, how do you implement all of this? That’s where Jama Connect comes in. Jama Connect is purpose-built to help consumer electronics product teams move faster while staying aligned and compliant.
Here’s how. Streamlining your regulatory compliance. Jama Connect enables teams to reuse standards across projects and push updates automatically from a central source of truth. And track which projects are falling behind or are out of compliance using comparison views. For modular design and reuse, standards are not the only reusable artifacts in Jama Connect. Library projects allow you to easily manage requirements for reusable or swappable components and product variants, complete with linked test cases.
Garman: Reuse accelerates development and reduces redundant validation so you can focus on what’s truly new. Jama Connect also supports you in spreading your traceability across the digital thread. You can create a real-time data connection between Jama Connect and Jira using Jama Connect Interchange™ to trace requirements to development activities and have the current status for all tasks visible with your requirements. Also, Jama Connect’s best-in-class REST API extends that interoperability even further across your toolchain. You get end-to-end traceability from ideation to requirements to tests from risks to releases. Jama Connect also builds in quality insights. Tools like Live Trace Explorer™ show where your project has trace gaps or low maturity and provides you with a score for your project coverage completeness. Jama Connect Advisor™ provides real-time guidance on requirement clarity, helping you catch issues before they cascade and quantifies the maturity of your requirements so that you can measure improvement.
With Jama Connect, you’re not just documenting development, you’re orchestrating it. You gain clarity, reuse what works, integrate where it counts and stay compliant without losing speed. In fact, this is a great time to turn things over to Yannick to show us what this looks like in action.
Jama Connect® Features in Five: Categories for Milestones
Milestone Tracking Made Simple with Jama Connect’s Categories Feature
Learn how you can supercharge your systems development process! In this blog series, we’re pulling back the curtains to give you a look at a few of Jama Connect’s powerful features… in under five minutes.
In this Features in Five session, Patrick Knowles, Senior Solutions Architect at Jama Software, demonstrates how Jama Connect’s Categories feature streamlines milestone tracking, boosts transparency, reduces risks, and ensures compliance.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Patrick Knowles: Hello, I’m Patrick Knowles, Senior Solutions Consultant for Aerospace and Defense at Jama Software. In this video, I’ll demonstrate how teams can use Jama Connect’s Categories feature to improve visibility of deliverables at key development milestones throughout an airborne system’s product development cycle. This approach helps increase transparency, reduce risk, and ensure timely delivery of critical data.
When developing a complex system of systems such as an aircraft like an eVTOL, teams heavily rely on milestones. Tracking what is due at each milestone and certification stage can be a complex web of documents, schedules, and loose threads. Jama Connect’s Categories feature simplifies this by clearly organizing what’s due and when. This boosts transparency for engineering teams and reduces the risk of missed deadlines, as well as ensuring compliance with standards like ARP-4754 for systems such as an eVTOL.
Knowles: Solution. An organization administrator can set up milestone-specific Categories in Jama Connect. These Categories are assigned to the information due at each stage of a program, enabling teams to create filters, dashboards, and reviews for clear visibility. Unlike tags or other manual methods, Categories provide a structured error-resistant way to manage milestone data, reducing risks like copy-paste mistakes. Let’s open Jama Connect and learn how to enable this strategy in the tool.
The first step is to ensure Categories is enabled within the project. An organization administrator will enter the admin tab within their Jama Connect instance. From there, they will navigate to the category section of the tab and turn the toggle that enables Categories. After Categories is enabled, the administrator will begin to develop the specific Categories that will enable the team to track each milestone. The administrator will add a system development phase category by selecting add and populating the name. This will serve as the parent category, which the rest of the lifecycle milestones will be grouped underneath. From here, the administrator will add the rest of the milestones as individual Categories and move them under the system development phase parent.
It is a best practice in this case to use the move functionality rather than the copy functionality to keep the Categories trees simple and clean. Additionally, when complying with regulatory standards and requirements, it is best to clearly align your milestone. The milestones used throughout the rest of this example are derived from the ARP-4754B and its systems requirements process. This method can be expanded to any number of other regulatory docu ments as well. With all of the milestones created, the administrator has one last step to complete, assigning the parent system development phase category to the appropriate projects or enabling it to be globally accessible.
Knowles: After your team’s organization administrator has completed the creation of the milestone Categories, it is time to implement within the project. First, a user will go into a project and begin to categorize components, sets, and folders that belong to each of the Categories. It is easiest to categorize top-down from components, sets, and folders, and then to batch manage Categories of each of the item types within the logical organizers. With the organizers categorized, the user can then manage the Categories of the individual items within each organizer.
Now that the hard work is done, it is time to harvest the fruits of the labor. The simplest way to do this is to open the Categories tab in the project and select any of the milestone Categories. With one click, the user will see all the items associated with that milestone. However, this isn’t the only way to visualize the information. A best practice for viewing Categories is to set up filters. By developing filters that narrow in on the information due at the upcoming milestone, a team can target that work and ensure it is effectively completed. Once a filter is created, the user can even utilize it to narrow down the project’s explorer by right-clicking on the filter and selecting apply filter to explorer. This will automatically sort the explorer to only display the information within the specific filter. Additionally, a team can use this filtering to help expedite exports or reports related to this narrowed down amount of information.
Knowles: At Jama Software, we strive to ensure our customers are able to successfully implement and develop their products through the use of Jama Connect. Lifecycle milestones are no small feat, and the team here at Jama Software knows that. Creating a user-friendly and maintainable approach to developing and tracking data due at each lifecycle milestone is the driving force behind this Jama Connect features inside. By tracking data deliverables for lifecycle milestones in Jama Connect with Categories, a team will increase transparency, reduce the potential for error, and improve their data delivery process at Lifecycle Milestones. Through simple organization administration setup, a team can quickly align the work they are developing in Jama Connect to lifecycle milestones and improve their current processes. To find out more about tracking developmental milestones with Categories in Jama Connect, please visit our website at jamasoftware.com.
How Jama Software Can Help Industrial Machinery Developers Stay Competitive in 2025
Layoffs in the industrial machinery sector are rising across Europe, reflecting growing pressures in an industry that is becoming increasingly complex. For machinery development engineers, systems engineers, and product managers, finding ways to streamline processes, ensure compliance, and get products to market faster is more important than ever. Enter Jama Software.
Jama Connect® is a powerful tool tailored to help machinery developers tackle challenges, reduce costs, and gain a competitive edge. By providing robust solutions for requirements management, risk mitigation, and team collaboration, Jama Software offers a way forward amid rising industry complexities.
This blog will explore the evolving industrial machinery landscape in 2025, highlight the challenges driving the need for efficiency, and show how Jama Software can help companies save money while maintaining their competitive advantage.
The Industrial Machinery Landscape in 2025
The industrial machinery sector is on the brink of transformation as we approach 2025. Innovation is surging, but so are challenges. Here are the key factors shaping the current landscape:
1. Increasing Complexity of Machinery Development
Today’s machinery is more advanced than ever. With the rise of automation, IoT, and advanced robotics, machines require intricate systems integrating hardware and software. This complexity demands precise requirements management and traceability to avoid costly missteps.
2. Growing Regulatory Demands
Industrial machinery must comply with stringent safety and regulatory standards, such as IEC 61508. Meeting these requirements adds layers of complexity, often requiring significant time and resources to ensure full compliance.
3. Cost Pressures and Market Competition
Global competition is intensifying, pushing businesses to innovate faster while keeping costs low. Additionally, labor shortages and economic instability in key regions, including Europe, are forcing companies to optimize their operations to maintain profitability.
4. Focus on Sustainable Development
Sustainability and energy efficiency are no longer optional but essential. Product developers must design machines that meet green standards while maintaining performance and reliability, which adds another layer of complexity.
Navigating these challenges requires a new approach to machinery development. That’s where Jama Software steps in.
How Jama Software Helps Save Money in Machinery Development
Jama Software is designed to meet the unique needs of industrial machinery developers. From cutting costs to boosting productivity, Jama Connect offers solutions that address some of the most pressing challenges in machinery development.
1. Efficient Requirements Management
With Jama Connect, machinery developers can manage complex requirements effectively. Here’s how it helps cut costs:
Clearer Specifications: Reduce rework by ensuring all stakeholders understand and agree on requirements from the start.
Live Traceability™: Track changes and link high-level requirements to detailed specifications, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
Faster Reviews and Approvals: Jama Connect’s collaborative review process significantly shortens approval times, reducing delays in development.
For example, FORT Robotics, an industrial robotics company, used Jama Connect to reduce their requirements approval process from weeks to just minutes, creating significant time and cost savings.
2. Enhanced Collaboration Across Teams
Siloed communication often leads to misaligned goals, increased errors, and wasted time. Jama Connect eliminates these inefficiencies by offering:
Real-Time Collaboration: Teams can work together across functions, share feedback, and resolve issues seamlessly in one platform.
Cross-Functional Visibility: Gain a comprehensive view of the development process, helping teams identify potential risks early.
This level of collaboration reduces miscommunication and minimizes resource wastage, which is especially important in cost-sensitive industries like machinery development.
3. Compliance Made Easy
Meeting compliance standards like IEC 61508 is both time-consuming and costly. Jama Software simplifies compliance by:
Providing Best Practice Frameworks: Teams can use pre-configured templates and guidelines tailored for safety-critical systems.
Ensuring End-to-End Traceability: From initial requirements to testing and maintenance, Jama Connect ensures that all steps comply with industry standards.
By streamlining compliance processes, Jama Connect helps reduce the risk of costly recalls or regulatory penalties.
4. Risk Mitigation
Every development project carries inherent risks, especially in complex machinery systems. Jama Software minimizes risks through:
Proactive Risk Identification: Built-in risk management features help teams identify potential issues early before they escalate.
Continuous Monitoring: Track risks throughout the development lifecycle, ensuring they remain under control.
Minimizing development risks saves both time and money, preventing costly setbacks that can derail a project.
5. Accelerating Time to Market
The faster you can get your product to market, the more competitive your business will be. Jama Connect speeds up product development with:
Streamlined Processes: Automated workflows and traceability reduce time spent on manual tasks.
Reuse of Requirements: Save time by reusing validated requirements for similar projects, eliminating redundancy.
Hannah Potter, Systems Engineer at IonQ, shared, “The review function has been a lifesaver… We can use our requirements and test plans for the basis of future designs, targeting our goal of continuing to build better and faster machines.”
6. Cost-Effective Scaling
For companies experiencing growth, scalability is a major concern. Jama Software is designed to scale with your business needs without requiring expensive customizations or additional tools. Its robust platform supports even the most complex systems with ease.
The industrial machinery sector is at a critical juncture. Developers who adapt to the current complexities will thrive, while those who cling to outdated processes risk falling behind. Jama Software provides the tools needed to stay ahead in this fast-changing market.
Here’s why you should consider Jama Software now:
Save money by eliminating inefficiencies and reducing rework.
Meet regulatory standards faster and with confidence.
Collaborate more effectively across teams and locations.
Mitigate risks to ensure smoother development cycles.
Stay competitive by launching high-quality machines faster.
Take the Next Step Toward Cost-Effective Machinery Development
Whether you’re dealing with mounting cost pressures, compliance challenges, or complex system requirements, Jama Software is the solution you’ve been searching for. With tools built specifically for industrial machinery developers, Jama Connect empowers your team to cut costs, save time, and maintain consistency in delivering innovative products.
Choosing the Best Tool for Requirements Management in the Automotive Industry (Even If Your Suppliers Use Something Else)
Requirements management plays a vital role in the product development lifecycle, impacting everyone in the automotive industry—from project managers and architects to software teams, systems engineers, and senior executives. Whether you’re overseeing the development of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) or managing the assembly of an entire vehicle platform, having a robust requirements management tool that helps support engineering governance can mean the difference between success and costly delays.
But here’s where it can get tricky. Your organization isn’t developing products in a vacuum. You’re constantly collaborating with a network of suppliers, each of whom may have their own preferred requirement management tools. The question then becomes, should you compromise your needs and processes to align with the tools your suppliers are using, or can you select the BEST tool for your needs and ensure seamless collaboration anyway?
Spoiler alert: The answer lies in selecting the right tool for your organization, regardless of what your suppliers are using. Here’s how you can make that decision with confidence.
Why Picking the Wrong Tool Could Cost You
Many automotive companies end up selecting requirements management tools solely because their suppliers use them. While this might seem like the easiest path to collaboration, it can actually result in more inefficiencies and frustrations down the road.
Key Challenges of Adopting the Wrong Tool:
Misalignment with Your Processes: Tools that don’t support your specific workflows or business goals can disrupt productivity.
Steep Learning Curves: Adopting a tool simply because others are using it can lead to excessive training needs. If the interface isn’t user-friendly or intuitive for your team, adoption rates may plummet.
Limited Scalability: What works for your supplier today may not meet your complex or evolving needs tomorrow.
Missed Opportunities: A mediocre tool can restrict innovation and time to market. When you’re stuck trying to make something work, you’re not maximizing efficiency or leveraging the full power of your processes.
The takeaway? It’s your team working day in and day out with the requirements management tool — not your suppliers. That means your organization’s specific needs should come first.
Must-Have Features in a Requirements Management Tool
Choosing the right software isn’t just about checking boxes. It’s about finding a tool that fits seamlessly into your automotive development environment and supports collaboration across your supplier network.
Here are some must-have features to look for:
1: Advanced Traceability
Traceability is vital in the automotive industry for safety-critical systems and regulatory compliance. The right tool should allow you to trace requirements across your entire system—from initial stakeholder needs to risks and mitigations to testing and validation. A tool that allows you to span the entire V-Model with high visibility and ease of tracking gaps and potential risks is key. Dashboard views and other means to obtain a holistic view of the progress of your project are essential for senior management to maintain a pulse on the project and ensure progress is being made with minimal risk.
2: Change Management and Version Control
Selecting a tool that allows for change to be controlled and easily reacted to is essential for a requirements management software. Suspect triggers allow downstream impacts to be easily identified and remedied. Proactive strategies and features like impact analysis, allow for change to be assed prior to making changes, allowing teams to prepare for the impact before it happens.
Ensure you look for a tool that is well-versed in your industry and understands the intimate details of the business challenges you face. Ideally, the tool you select will have frameworks and datasets that adhere to your regulatory and safety compliance standards. Standards and regulations, including ISO 21434:2021, ISO 26262:2018, and ASPICE, are essential, and the tool you select should help facilitate your compliance with these standards.
4: Cross-Tool Interoperability
One of the biggest concerns when choosing a tool that your suppliers may or may not be using is interoperability. Look for software that supports standards like ReqIF (Requirements Interchange Format) to facilitate seamless exchange of requirements with external stakeholders across your entire ecosystem. This ensures you can collaborate effectively without sacrificing your own processes.
5: AI and Automation Capabilities
Modern requirements management tools leverage AI to speed up processes and improve quality. Automation capabilities can also eliminate repetitive tasks, freeing up your team to focus on higher-value work. Automatic test case generation, glossary definition, risk detection, IP identification are now considered key to requirements management and will be the standard moving forward.
Your requirements management solution should grow with your organization. Whether you’re managing one project or dozens, the tool should adapt to increased complexity and size. Performance at scale should be a key consideration. You’ll always need a tool that is easy to administer. You should not need a specialized role to perform this task. Cloud hosting options provide flexibility and lowers cost of ownership. SOC2 hosting environments along with a product that is also SOC2 certified is essential when considering today’s ever-evolving security risks.
7: Configurable Workflows, Customized Reports, and Export Templates
Every team operates differently. A versatile tool will allow you to configure workflows, reports, and export templates so it fits with how you work, rather than forcing you to change your processes.
8: Supply Chain Collaboration Features
While you shouldn’t need the exact same tool as your suppliers, features like shared requirements repositories, real-time commenting, and simplified export/import options make it easier to stay on the same page — even if you’re working on different platforms. Having a tool that allows you to invite external stakeholders into your reviews (at no cost) is a major benefit and consideration.
The Case for Putting Your Needs First
Imagine you’re working on a next-gen electric vehicle platform. While your suppliers might be focused on delivering specific components (like an ECU or software component), you’re responsible for the big picture. A tool that fails to give you high-level visibility simply because it aligns with your supplier’s processes? That’s a no-go.
When you select a tool based on your needs, you gain the following advantages:
Streamlined Internal Processes: You can focus on efficiency and alignment within your team without constantly adapting to external tools.
Improved Quality Management: With better traceability and error reduction mechanisms, your team is better positioned to meet high-quality standards.
Flexibility to Work with Any Supplier: The right tool ensures you can collaborate effectively with any supplier, regardless of what they’re using.
Making Collaboration Work Across Different Tools
If your suppliers aren’t using the same tool, how do you handle the exchange of requirements? The good news is that most modern requirements management tools include features that make cross-platform collaboration easier than you might think.
Here’s How You Can Ensure Smooth Collaboration Regardless of Tools:
Leverage ReqIF Standards: ReqIF facilitates reliable requirements exchange across your entire ecosystem. By adopting a tool with strong ReqIF support, you ensure compatibility with your suppliers, no matter what software they prefer.
Utilize Integrations and APIs: Many requirements management platforms offer direct integrations to popular tools such as Jira, Teamcenter, LDRA, Simulink, and other best of breed tools. APIs or third-party integration tools can help bridge the gap between systems, creating a smoother flow of information.
Define Common Terminology and Traceability Information Models: Consistent and clear data standards and traceability models reduce friction when exchanging files or tracing requirements. Establish these standards early in the collaboration process to ensure seamless communication across all stakeholders.
Invest in Training and Consulting Services: While the right tool should be intuitive, training ensures your team gains expertise in leveraging advanced features for cross-platform requirements exchange. Look for companies that will partner with you from the start with industry expert consultants and can consult with your on your journey to success. Avoid those that outsource or charge high consulting fees after you’ve started your project, which will result in cost and delays.
Choosing the best requirements management tool for your automotive projects is no small task. But if you prioritize your organization’s unique needs while leveraging cross-platform compatibility features, you can have the best of both worlds.
Your requirements tool should empower your team, streamline your processes, and enhance collaboration without forcing you to compromise. Don’t settle for “good enough” just to align with supply chain tools when you can choose what’s “best for us”—and still work seamlessly with partners.
Curious about which tool could be the best fit for your needs? Start exploring modern requirements management tool like Jama Connect so you can stay ahead in this era of increasing complexity in the automotive industry.
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