Systems Engineering For The Masses | Lessons Learned at Procter & Gamble

Description

Increasing product, supply chain and manufacturing complexity have driven all industries to pursue “Model Based System Engineering” (MBSE). To this end, the past decade of development in systems engineering (SE) methods, standards and tools has resulted in many new foundational MBSE capabilities (e.g. ISO15288, SysML, FMI, OSLC, and countless other invaluable standards).

However, these capabilities have typically been developed in a bottom-up fashion to deliver benefits within the classic software and engineering disciplines. As a result, systems models exclude many disciplines and often fall short of the level of abstraction required to support cross-discipline collaboration on the requirements. In addition, the resulting systems models are often too solution-oriented to enable broad-scale re-use of the fundamental underlying technical knowledge in future innovation work. Last, but not least, the complexity of the underlying tool meta-models (e.g. SysML) and tool user interfaces tend to hinder adoption by “the masses” of non-systems engineering experts that must able to interact with systems models (to bring enterprise-wide MBSE to life).

To tackle the above challenges, Procter & Gamble (P&G) partnered with leading-edge systems engineering method suppliers (e.g. ICTT, BigLever), leading-edge tool vendors (e.g. IBM, TomSawyer, The ReUse Company, Modelon, etc.) and systems integration and modeling tool experts (321 Gang).

After two years of development and multiple pilots, we have taken a big step forward in providing the canonical systems modeling and analysis capabilities to deliver systems engineering capabilities to “the masses”. The resulting method and tools are usable by personnel at all levels of the enterprise, in all disciplines, throughout all phases of an initiative’s lifecycle.

This presentation will review the key strategies and decisions behind the break-through new capability and some aspects of the solution will be demonstrated.