What Is Systems Engineering?
The International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) defines Systems Engineering as a “transdisciplinary and integrative approach to enable the successful realization, use, and retirement of engineered systems, using systems principles and concepts, and scientific, technological, and management methods.”
Modern products are complex systems, and it is increasingly challenging for engineers and other stakeholders with various levels of expertise to create, communicate, and collaborate on design details in the context of uniformly understood design intent throughout the product’s lifecycle. System engineers (SEs) are the practitioners of systems engineering. Using systems thinking principals, SEs capture design intent in a system model, which becomes a connective tissue between detailed implementations of the various parts of these complex systems. Often these system models become a collection of system models referred to as a system-of-systems.
System models allow all business units and their supply chains to maintain a common understanding of design intent. Some of the key benefits include:
Expressing requirements as modeled behaviors instead of text
- Better understanding of requirements, since they are modeled as behaviors instead of being declared in text
- Improved collaboration across teams, since system models allow the teams to interact with graphical and interactive representations of complex architectures and logical/functional breakdowns
- Better understanding of cause and effect, as a central model, makes it easier to see how changes to system components or external factors impact the entire system
- Improved quality and accuracy, as teams can identify and resolve conflicts faster with traceability of the decisions via a PLM-managed digital thread.
- Elimination of systems engineering silos, as SEs become interactively engaged with the rest of the team at every stage of the system’s lifecycle
- Accelerated rate of innovation, as organizations experiment with innovative ideas, SEs can leverage system models to experiment and collaborate with teams on various ways of realizing them
Systems Thinking
Systems thinking is a way of thinking that emphasizes a holistic view of all systems. It is not a tool.
Systems thinking considers not only the behavior of the individual system components (sub-systems) but also the behavior resulting from interactions of the components with the other elements and the environment surrounding the system (system of systems). Systems Thinking seeks to understand behaviors on the parts’ boundaries and how a change in one part will influence other parts. Systems thinking is directly opposite to reductionism (divide and conquer) because reductionism assumes that someone can understand the behavior of a part by focusing on only one part of the system at a time.
System models
While systems engineering tools, methodologies, and systems thinking reflected in the organizational culture are critical for systems engineering, accessibility of the system models at every stage of the product’s lifecycle is foundational. This is because the true value of a system model can only be realized if the rest of the organization and the entire supply chain can leverage these models in their work. System models do not define detailed designs of mechanical, electronic, electrical, or software implementations; they define system and sub-system behaviors on an abstracted representation of the target design architecture, including logical and functional breakdown.
In many organizations system models are also used to capture various business and organizational processes to ensure that there is a uniform understanding and experimenting with them.
Systems engineering and product lifecycle management
Traditionally, systems engineering activities and system models were not integrated with product lifecycle management (PLM) platforms. As a result, the phase of capturing stakeholder requirements in a form of behavioral system model (a high-level abstraction of the future product) was a data and expertise silo without a connection to the PLM’s product lifecycle management of detailed product implementation. That was a significant gap in the product design process since (PLM) is a platform for managing detailed product design data and lifecycle stages, including transition from engineering Bill of Materials (eBOM) to manufacturing Bill of Materials (eBOm).
When an organization can manage SE-generated system model structures as part of the PLM environment, it can develop more innovative products and systems quicker. This is because this allows for continuous interaction between SEs and all other engineering domains at every step of the product lifecycle. When the system engineering and PLM users can “speak the same language,” they can use time and resources more wisely.
How Aras unifies systems engineering and PLM
Aras Innovator, our product lifecycle management platform, offers a central and connected “where” for SEs to collaborate with all other engineering teams. It manages multidisciplinary systems models in a unified digital thread, establishing and maintaining traceability between requirements, models, simulations, collaboration artifacts, physical parts lists, and product feedback throughout the product’s lifecycle This complete product lifecycle traceability follows a product and its digital assets from concept through design, manufacturing, quality, and service.
With all this product data accessible through a single platform, systems engineering and other engineering teams can better iterate and improve products over time without repeating each other’s work or letting small details go unseen. When one piece of a product must change based on customer feedback, new regulations, etc., the ramifications of that change can easily be seen across the system.