What should you look for in a systems engineering solution for your company to manage multi-discipline systems?
As products become smarter and more connected, they also get more complex. Expert systems engineering practices can help to manage this complexity, especially when you are developing multi-discipline systems. The right technology can also be critical to support those practices. This buyer’s guide, Engineering Buyer’s Guide for Multi-Discipline Systems: The Expert Solutions Guide, provides a framework to evaluate systems engineering solutions to help you select the right solution for your company. It provides checklists for software requirements across multiple aspects of systems engineering, requirements to make the implementation a success, vendor requirements, and special considerations. By evaluating these requirements, you will be better positioned to select the right solution to successfully manage multi-discipline systems.
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Table of Contents
- Executive Overview
- The Business Value of Systems Engineering
- Start with Process Definition
- Manage Requirements
- Design the System
- Design the System to be Modular
- Support Product Line Variants
- Enable Detailed Design
- Support Connectivity
- Verify and Validate the System
- Assess Service Requirements
- Consider Vendor Attributes
- Identify Specific Needs for Your Company
- Conclusion
- Recommendations
- About the Author
- Acknowledgments
Executive Summary
Fierce global competition continues to drive companies to seek new ways to competitively differentiate their products. Many achieve this differentiation through smarter and more connected products. This approach creates many innovative possibilities for new products and services.
While smarter products and connectivity create exciting opportunities for innovation, they also bring unique challenges and add new levels of complexity. Much of this complexity comes from requirements to integrate mechanical components, electronics, and software. Connectivity adds further complexity as you add sensors, streaming data, and an ecosystem of connected systems. Whether you are a systems engineer, product architect, or domain-specific engineer, addressing this complexity requires expert systems engineering practices.
To set the foundation for expert systems engineering practices, companies should focus on the entire systems engineering process, ensuring there are solutions for all aspects of systems engineering. Expert systems engineering practices will help companies become even more competitive in ways that will lead to higher growth and greater profitability.
The right technology is an essential part of implementing and supporting these expert systems engineering practices. The right technology will enable improved collaboration, better traceability with a digital thread, and earlier visibility to potential problems. This will result in a more efficient development process while reducing the risk of finding errors late in the process, helping to avoid delays and increased costs. This buyer’s guide will help manufacturers select the right software to support systems engineering.
This guide comprises four major sections covering systems engineering software tool functionality, service requirements, vendor attributes, and special company considerations (Figure 1). Each section includes a checklist of key requirements to support your selection process for systems engineering software tools.
Conclusion
Expert systems engineering practices are vital to take advantage of innovation available through 
embedded software and the Internet of Things. The opportunities to create smart, connected devices can help companies set their products apart from the competition, helping them win new customers and increase revenues. However, bringing together systems of mechanical components, electronics, and software is complex. That complexity grows exponentially as companies try to meet the various needs of customers with different configurations. Connected systems add even further complexity as you add sensors, streaming data, and connected ecosystems.
Complexity increases the risk that things will go wrong. The impact of these problems can have a significant business impact and hurt product profitability. Implementing expert systems engineering practices, with the right software tools to support them, can manage this complexity, making it easier to successfully bring profitable products to market. Even if today’s smart, connected devices are relatively simple, as they evolve and offer critical services such as those that impact safety, they will increase in complexity and need the same level of expert systems engineering practices.
These practices and the supporting solution are not just limited to systems engineers either. There are a variety of IoT-related roles involved with planning, designing, and architecting connected systems, such as IoT solution architects, who will struggle with the exact same challenges as systems engineers. Companies planning for growth should consider both current and future needs.
However, there are so many aspects of systems engineering; determining the right solution for your company can be very difficult. Using a high-level list of tool and process evaluation criteria such as the ones in this guide can help narrow down potential solutions. The lists provide a quick “litmus test” to determine if a solution and partner are a good fit before conducting detailed functional or technical reviews. In the end, it is crucial to ensure that functionality, service, vendor, and special requirements are all considered when selecting a solution.
*This summary is an abbreviated version of the ebook and does not contain the full content. For the full report, please visit our sponsor PTC.
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