ALM Solutions for CRA compliance: When does integration pay off?

The most common question: "Can we achieve CRA compliance with our existing tools?"

The honest answer: it depends on your product portfolio. Break-even is around 3 products.

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The Cyber Resilience Act demands bidirectional, systematic traceability across your entire product lifecycle, from requirements to deployment. The challenge isn't doing the work; it's proving you did it. Most organizations use 5+ disconnected tools for requirements, code, tests, risks, and documentation. When an auditor asks for complete traceability of a vulnerability fix, compiling that evidence manually takes hours, not minutes. That's the compliance gap.

The question isn't whether you need traceability, it's how to achieve it efficiently. Should you integrate your existing tools or invest in a unified ALM platform? The answer depends on your product portfolio.

Your two options

Option 1: Extend Existing Tools
This makes sense when you have less than 3 products, a well-integrated tool landscape, and dedicated resources for tool integration. The typical approach involves connecting Jira/Git/TestRail via APIs, custom scripts for traceability, and manual SBOM generation. Costs are €20-40k initial plus 0.3-0.5 FTE per product ongoing. The risk: fragile integration that's difficult to scale with high maintenance effort.

Option 2: Integrated ALM Platform
This makes sense when you have more than 3 products, a fragmented tool landscape, or need a scalable, future-proof solution. The typical approach uses a central ALM platform with native traceability, automated SBOM generation, and vulnerability scanning. Costs are €100-200k initial plus 0.1 FTE per product ongoing. Benefits include scalability to 10, 50, 100+ products, future-proof vendor support, audit-ready reports in minutes, faster time-to-market, reduced audit risk, and better product quality.

What to look for in an ALM platform?

Industry-specific templates (IEC 62304, ISO 21434, DO-178C)
Bidirectional traceability across all artifacts
Automated SBOM generation + vulnerability scanning
Tool chain integration (Git, Jira, Jenkins)
Scalability with your product portfolio
Vendor support for CRA compliance implementation

Why Siemens Polarion ALM?

30+ years in regulated industries (medical devices, aerospace, automotive)
Compliance-by-design for regulated environments
Unified platform,requirements, design, code, test, risk in one system
Industry templates including CRA template out-of-the-box
Global consulting network for implementation support

What you should do now

How many products are you managing? Let's discuss which option makes sense for you.