Engineering organizations in regulated industries such as Automotive, Medical Devices, Aerospace, Rail and others, are challenged to demonstrate compliance with industrial process standards (DODAF for Defense Architectures, Autosar, ASPICE, ISO 26262, DO-178B/C and for medical devices IEC 62304). Such standards are either related to functional safety or process maturity assessments. Failure to demonstrate compliance or receiving low assessments can hinder suppliers from getting business or put manufacturers under liability risks or completely prevent delivery of products. The compliance challenge is a major opportunity to show the value of adopting Systems Engineering practices and a technological platform to address such essential challenges.

In addition to this, the new paradigm for the future is Internet of Thing and the rule is going to be: “Anything that can be connected, will be connected.” Say for example you are on your way to a meeting: your car could have access to your calendar and already know the best route to take. If the traffic is heavy your car might send a text to the other party notifying them that you will be late. What if your office equipment knew when it was running low on supplies and automatically re-ordered more?

What if the wearable device you used in the workplace could tell you when and where you were most active and productive and shared that information with other devices that you used while working? Everything is connected with everything and software is everywhere, making today’s systems (and systems of systems) very complex. As engineering complexity rises, engineering regulatory standards are demanded from manufacturer and new engineering regulations are being introduced for Software intensive products.

Software is changing the game, allowing companies to enter in new markets and allowing the creation of multiples product lines.

Software is driving the value, the innovation, the differentiation in products today but … could be a source of problems.

Just a few examples: in Automotive market, lines of code in new Ford F-150 Truck 10 speed transmission = 1 million, in 2003 this was 155 K, so Quality Assurance and Testing spending is predicted to increase to 40% of total IT budget by 2019. In Aerospace and Defense market, 5 generation F-35 functionality is 90% Software driven compared to F-16 which has 40% functionality driven by Software. F-35 testing cost overrun $ 1 Billion caused by late identification of software errors in prior versions of the software. In Life Science market, the da Vinci S surgical robotic system has 1.4 million lines of code, computing power of 7 laptops and 10,000 individual parts.

 

In order to mitigate the risks, better engineering practices are needed, to address the new challenges:

• Little or no visibility into the progression of development of the various engineering artifacts
• Manage traceability across multi-disciplinary engineering artifacts
• Clear specification of the engineering process and how the process relates to the generated artifacts
• Providing evidence for required activities (for example, verification)
• Standardizing the process across the organization
• Recording artifacts changes and configurations.

The adoption of Systems Engineering practices and a technological platform in accordance with the dictates of INCOSE (International Council on Systems Engineering) can helps customer in demonstrating:

• Requirements, design, and test are properly managed across the entire lifecycle
• Traceability across all engineering which is essential to support the various compliance standards
• Metrics and reporting – visualization of progress as to the completion of the various engineering activities and completion of artifacts for all project stakeholders
• Configuration and Change management processes – mandated by all safety and maturity standards

In such a way, meeting engineering compliance demands provide an opportunity to save costs and increase efficiency, allowing a company to combine innovation and value and to delight their customers WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY driving value back towards their own bottom line: that is when they will win in this competitive marketplace.

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