ABSTRACTSince 1992 Maurer Söhne is developing an automated car park system and now has built a prototype for the City of Augsburg, 60 km west from Munich. During this project problems arose, especially with respect to changes. Therefore, Maurer Söhne started to implement systems engineering methods to overcome those problems in the planned serial production of the automated car park system. This paper is not a glorification of a development process, instead it describes the problems and their causes, what we called “management by Beckenbauer”, during the development phase. Furthermore, the paper shows how Maurer Söhne started to solve one of the main problems, i.e. to manage changes, by implementing special systems engineering methods.