Product Systems Engineering Background
Business Objectives and Products
During the last 40 years enterprises have evolved from responding to local and regional needs to the global needs brought about by the growing global economies. In today’s hypercompetitive business environments enterprises need to understand the business segments, desired market segments and market positions, the products or product lines required for their business segments, financial goals, etc. Within this business context any product development/launch (new product, product enhancements, markets growth or new markets, etc.) needs to be aligned with the overall business goals and objectives, the enterprise internal capabilities, and the competition within the selected markets. There also needs to be alignment between the end product itself and its corresponding realization system and sustainment system. A new product concept demands an analysis of not only its own potential, but also current and potential markets, current and future technology advances as well as the culture, focus, goals, and processes of the organization to exploit the new product potential. Additionally, competitors’ offerings and plans for product expansion (new functionalities, features, services, etc.) or for new unexplored markets and the enterprise’s ability to react have to be analyzed and monitored for the enterprise business to remain competitive in the long term.
Relationship between Product SE and Product Development
Product development is the complete process of bringing a new product to market. Product SE is the activity involved in considering the complete product system (i.e., the product itself plus all its enabling elements) from a full lifecycle perspective, cradle to grave (or even more broadly, lust to dust).
One may think of two main sources of technology based product development: New products driven by business objectives which exploit innovations for the enhancements of existing products or the creation of new products to be realized within ever shorter market windows (short development times). The other source of product development comes from ideas/innovations which require long term research to understand the technology development requirements for the realization of the concept (Proof of concept) and have very long lead times (e.g. military aircrafts, bioengineering, etc.) before commitment to realize the actual product offering. Some authors claim that the NPD process in the case of strategic initiatives (long term applied research) and the systems engineering process are one and the same; in this KA we mainly concentrate on those driven by ever evolving market needs.
While new product development deals with the creation of products with new or different characteristics that offer new or additional benefits to the customer, product development may involve modification of an existing product or its presentation, or formulation of an entirely new product that satisfies a newly defined customer want or market niche. http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/product-development.html
It might also involve changes to the ways in which the product comes about by modifying the realization system. For example, it might be necessary to change development practices, use different testing methods or facilities, or upgrade the manufacturing equipment and procedures. Furthermore, there might need to be changes to the sustainment system to accommodate this new product, such as improved customer support procedures and newly trained support personnel, upgraded maintenance facilities and tools, or modified spare parts delivery techniques.
New product ideas or concepts are often generated by exploiting existing or near future technology innovations; and/or technology breakthroughs brought about by long term research in resolving fundamental questions on matters of science or national/regional interest. In the case of existing technology innovations the customer may require an innovative product that (Phillips 2001):
• Use well-established technologies to help the enterprise improve the efficiency of current operations • Use well-established technologies to help the enterprise into new kind of operations • Use leading edge technologies to improve the efficiency of current operations or • Use leading edge technologies to help the enterprise into new kinds of operations
Notice that a product can be an organization or a process not merely the typical items we think of as products such as smart phones, military aircrafts, computers, command-control and communications center, cars, etc. Sometimes a product only needs product design engineering, when the complexity of the product does not justify the additional considerations when performing Product SE. Enterprise SE and Service SE should make the determination of when a product needs the extra efforts of Product SE to ensure product success.
In the present global economy rapid response times to customer needs, constant evolving markets, and continuous technology innovations require the Product Development process to be dynamic, adaptive, and competitive on cost, time-to-market, performance, and quality on a global scale. In addition, the multidisciplinary nature of products demands close participation not only of the different specialty engineering fields (mechanical, electrical, industrial, materials, etc.) but also finance to analyze total cost of development (including production), marketing and sales (understand market behavior and acceptance), manufacturers and distributors, legal and public relations experts.
This has mandated modern enterprises to assess how they create their products and services; Integrated Product Teams (IPT) and the Integrated Product Development Teams (IPDT) approach has helped enterprises streamline the development process to respond to the mentioned market pressures.
Product Systems Engineering
Since products are as diverse as the customers that acquire them, the proper application of systems engineering and analysis ensures the timely and balanced use of human, financial, technological assets and technology investments to minimize problems, harmonize overall results, and maximize customer satisfaction and company profits. In general, Product Systems Engineering deals with the efficient use of all company resources to achieve the business objectives and deliver a quality product. Product Systems Engineering activities range from concept to design to analysis and determine how conceptual and physical factors can be altered to manufacture the most cost-effective, environmentally friendly product that will satisfy customer requirements. Engineering the product system requires an interdisciplinary approach that includes analysis of the product and its related elements such as manufacturing, maintenance, support, logistics, phase-out, and disposal, all of these items being part of either the realization system or the sustainment system. However, there are no universally accepted Methods, Processes and Technologies (MPTs) for end-to-end analysis of products and their supporting subsystems; it can be said every product needs to adapt existing MPT based on prior experiences and best practices such as Toyota(Hitchens 2007), Mitre (Trudeau 2010) and NASA (NASA SELDP 2011). Product Systems Engineering will enhance and assist in the development of an end-to-end analysis of products and its sub-systems by placing emphasis on the following areas:
• Determining the overall scope of needs of the product system
• Defining product and system requirements with regards to the customer
• Addressing the products and its subsystems from a end-to-end lifecycle perspective
• Considering all interactions between the different elements of the product system
• Organizing and Integrating necessary engineering disciplines in an integrated end-to-end systems engineering effort
• Establishing a disciplined approach that includes, review, evaluation and feedback and ensures orderly and efficient progress
There is currently a debate among SE professionals on the need to adapt the SE process when concepts/ideas demand long term research and development of new technologies that are not foreseen in the near future and require substantial investment and time to get to the proof of concept, Initial Operational Capabilities (IOC) and/or prototyping. The challenge is to create a process that can be easily adapted to constant and evolving needs/requirements, constant technology innovations that may render a committed product development obsolete even before deployment, etc. Platform based solutions to resolve some of these challenges (Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, Software as a Service) are being studied and proposed (MITRE 2010) (Boehm 2010).
Product Development Process
The Integrated Product Development Process (IPDP) process starts with customer/market needs with the objective to:
• Deliver products that satisfy and exceed customer expectations
• Rapid response to customer demands through adaptive product offerings
• Respond to changing business environments
• Incorporate systems thinking, generate new ideas, and co-create value
IPDP methods are continuous in nature with a goal to produce products whose cost, performance, features, time-to-market help increase company profitability and market share. Figure 1 provides a snapshot of an Integrated Product Development Process (IPDP). The IPDP is divided into four stages (Magrab et al. 2010)
Stage I: Product Identification
During this stage, the enterprise aims to identify a product idea that will be a good business investment for the company. Some of the outputs from a good Product Identification Stage include demonstration of strong customer need, determination of potential markets, business profitability, and sustainable product competitive advantage.
During this stage the SE process plays a key role working with Product Managers and the IPT to have back of the envelope input to assess needed technology innovation, viability of existing technologies, estimated time of development and cost of technology development, technology risk, propose technology development road map and functionality/features releases if any, etc. This initial assessment uses Rough Order of Magnitude (ROM) estimates within +/- 40% taken by the Product Managers to analyze the feasibility of a Business Case and come to a decision on entering the Concept Development stage, also known as Decision Gate -1
Stage II: Concept Development
The main goal of the Concept Development stage is to generate and develop Methods, Processes, and Technologies (MPTs) concepts that will satisfy the product’s performance goals. Some of the evaluation criteria that these concepts must fulfill are:
• Company’s core competencies can satisfy the requirements to produce the products
• Low technical and business risk
• Minimal change in market conditions and competitors
• Manufacturing resource requirements are close to planned allocations
• Prototypes indicate product’s economic viability and manufacturing feasibility
During this stage SE supports the IPDT in the analysis of alternatives (different concept solutions), identifying different operational scenarios and modes of operation, identifying the functional requirements of the products, defining Technical Performance Measures (TPM), identifying technology risks and performance risks, identifying the main components of the products and required interfaces among them, etc. This stage is highly interacting and iterative among several IPDT and in some instance because of the complexity of the products a Systems Engineering Integration Team is required to ensure analysis of all the possible solutions.
Techno-economical feasibility in terms of Time and Cost to develop the product are usually within +/-10%; in many instances it is possible at this stage to already have a Technology Roadmap developed to guide the product managers on possible phases for product releases. At this stage a decision is made to continue or not with the full development of the product according to a Product Roadmap jointly worked by the IPT through joint Preliminary Design Reviews.
Stage III: Design and Manufacturing
This stage includes creation of engineering drawings for the product, product configuration items specs, design for manufacturability/producibility, Design for X (DFX), manufacturing design plans, production plans and schedules, completion of a test production run that ensures that product meets customer requirements and quality criteria, and a plan for full production.
PSE works closely with the Projects Managers and product managers to create a Systems Engineering Management Plan (SEMP) to manage the technical effort. Requirements traceability; product architecture requirements and views; Operational requirements; Integration, Verification and product Validation plans; Modeling, Simulation and test & evaluation of the Product system under different scenarios to evaluate TPM; launch readiness plans including end-user test plans, operational readiness, etc. are many of the activities carried out by SE.
Stage IV: Launch
During this stage the product is delivered to its potential markets. A launch is considered successful when the product meets its quality goals, satisfies customer requirements, and realizes the business plan goals. PSE plays a consultant role with the product manager for the analysis and validation of TPM, test results and accuracy, and during the Continuous improvement process to monitor product and product system technical performance and product quality.
Relationship between Product SE and Technology Development
In today’s environment of accelerating technological advancement, product life cycles are becoming shorter especially for high technology products. As a result, enterprises face the risk of having outdated or obsolete products that cannot keep pace with markets trends, technology trends and/or customer expectations.
When analyzing new products ideas/innovations PSE should be aware of changing technologies and technology trends to provide inputs into the technical feasibility of the product in terms of Time & Cost for technology development. The result of this analysis should include the roadmap of technology developments required; the technology roadmap is then used to create the roadmap for the new product offering. In these cases the new Product ideas impose requirements on new technology developments.
But technology developments/breakthroughs (technology device in a lab environment) may also drive product innovation or the generation of new markets; here we may say that technology developments generate requirements on product features and functionalities and then Technology Readiness Levels (TRL), Integration Readiness Levels (IRL), Manufacturing Readiness Levels (MRL), System Readiness Levels (SRL), Operational Readiness of the enterprise to launch the product system among others dictate introduction of the products. See Product Readiness Article.
Care must be taken to understand the entities that compose the product; it is not unusual for a new product to require developments in several technologies (e.g., new materials, new electronic components, new or improved software, new maintenance and repair procedures, new processes, new organizational structures, etc.) All of these must be factored into the IPDP for the successful deployment and proper use of the product to be launched.
Product Types
A system is by definition composed of two or more components. The system itself is a component of a larger system, and you could also say that each component is a system on its own.
A single component consists of one or more of the basic product types shown in the figure below. Notice that a system product is not merely hardware or software. There are many other types of products that can perform the necessary functions that meet stakeholder needs. A product is any one of the system components that needs to be produced or acquired. Some components can be acquired (i.e., procured) as-is without need for fabrication or modification. Other products may need to be engineered, and in some cases need to be systems engineered. (Martin 1997)
Product Taxonomy
Basic product types are not necessarily mutually exclusive. For example, some would consider that facilities contain hardware and people. Others would consider facilities to be separate from hardware and people. Some will include material as part of hardware. The important thing to remember is to include all of the right components in the system being developed. Having a “taxonomy” of product types can serve as a checklist to ensure that all bases are covered.
Also, there are certain to be other basic product types, some only relevant to certain industries, such as ships for the shipping and naval domains, and structures for the civil engineering domains. The important thing to remember is that required behavior for a system should not necessarily be allocated only to hardware and software elements.
Figure 2 Basic Product Types that Constitute a Product System (Martin 1997)
Product Type Examples
Examples of each product type are shown below. (Martin 1997)
Table 1 Product Types
Materials could be thought of as basic raw materials, like steel, or as complex materials, like cladded metals, graphite composites, or building aggregate material. Personnel are not normally thought of as a “product,” but that depends on which system you are working with. The NASA space program “system” certainly produces astronauts. It is not usually possible to just go out and hire the particular person you need with the requisite knowledge, skills and experience. These personnel “products” can often be developed using a Product SE approach (Martin 1996). For example, you could specify requirements (i.e., required knowledge, skills and experience) for each person that is part of the system. You could specify the interfaces for the person as well as assessing the maturity of that personnel “product.” These are a few examples of how Product SE can be applied to personnel products.
In Enterprise SE we may need education and training systems as a part of our personnel system in order to produce people with the right competencies and capabilities.
References
Citations
Blanchard, B. and Fabrycky, W. 2011. Systems Engineering and Analysis. Prentice Hall International Series in Industrial and Systems Engineering. ISBN 978-0-13-221735-4
Boehm, B. 2010. Systems 2020 Strategic Initiative. Final Technical Report SERC-2010-TR-009. August 29, 2010. Unclassified
Grady, J. 2010. Systems Synthesis- Product and Process Design. CRC Press. ISBN 978-1-4398-1961-6
INCOSE, Systems Engineering Handbook, v3.1
Magrab, E., Gupta, S., McCluskey, P., and Sandborn, P. 2010. Integrated Product and Process Design and Development: The Product Realization Process. CRC Press. ISBN 978-1-4200-7060-6
Martin, J. 1997. Systems Engineering Guidebook: A process for developing systems and products. CRC Press.
MITRE. 2010. Platform as a Service: A 2010 Marketplace Analysis. Systems Engineering at MITRE. Cloud Computing Series
Morse, L. and Babcock, D. 2007. Managing Engineering and Technology. Fourth edition. Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-199421-2
NASA Systems Engineering Leadership Development Program (SELDP). 2011. Academy of Program/Project & Engineering Leadership (APPEL). Office of Chief Engineer.
Phillips, F. 2001. Market Oriented Technology Management: Innovating for Profit in Entrepreneurial Times. Springer. 3-540-41258-1
Trudeau, P.N. 2010. Designing and Enhancing a Systems Engineering Training and Development Program. The MITRE Corporation.
Wasson, C. S. 2006. System Analysis, Design, and Development. John Wiley & Sons. Hoboken, NJ, USA.
Primary References
Blanchard, B. and Fabrycky, W. 2011. Systems Engineering and Analysis. Prentice Hall International Series in Industrial and Systems Engineering. ISBN 978-0-13-221735-4
Grady, J. 2010. Systems Synthesis- Product and Process Design. CRC Press. ISBN 978-1-4398-1961-6
Magrab, E., Gupta, S., McCluskey, P., and Sandborn, P. 2010. Integrated Product and Process Design and Development: The Product Realization Process. CRC Press. ISBN 978-1-4200-7060-6
Additional References
Boehm, B. 2010. Systems 2020 Strategic Initiative. Final Technical Report SERC-2010-TR-009. August 29, 2010. Unclassified
INCOSE, Systems Engineering Handbook, v3.1
Martin, J. 1997. Systems Engineering Guidebook: A process for developing systems and products. CRC Press.
MITRE. 2010. Platform as a Service: A 2010 Marketplace Analysis. Systems Engineering at MITRE. Cloud Computing Series
Morse, L. and Babcock, D. 2007. Managing Engineering and Technology. Fourth edition. Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-199421-2
NASA Systems Engineering Leadership Development Program (SELDP). 2011. Academy of Program/Project & Engineering Leadership (APPEL). Office of Chief Engineer.
Phillips, F. 2001. Market Oriented Technology Management: Innovating for Profit in Entrepreneurial Times. Springer. 3-540-41258-1
Trudeau, P.N. 2010. Designing and Enhancing a Systems Engineering Training and Development Program. The MITRE Corporation.
Wasson, C. S. 2006. System Analysis, Design, and Development. John Wiley & Sons. Hoboken, NJ, USA.
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