I’ve been talking to customers for a number of years about what they need to better solve their systems engineering problems. The key themes always include managing requirements, architecture, and testing/validation in an increasingly complex product landscape. Today, that product landscape typically involves complex products. As they look to the future, manufacturers are expanding their scope to design and build products that are part of smart, connected systems of systems.
The challenges faced by today’s discrete manufacturers really highlight the need for improving on existing methods for how they do business. The continual growth of product complexity, more distributed design teams, and the pressure to release more products on-time with better quality at lower cost have all put significant pressures on current engineering processes and approaches. Our customers look to us to provide new solutions to help them deliver their best products.
I know that the PTC Systems Engineering Solution, whose release is being announced this week at the PTC Live event in Stuttgart, Germany, will help our customers address many of these needs.
The solution helps organizations:
- Design more innovative products using a collaborative, model-based systems engineering approach
- Reuse systems artifacts to enable profitable product line engineering
- Validate products meet requirements and best practice processes are followed
The PTC Systems Engineering Solution combines the PTC System Requirements and Validation Solution with the functionality recently acquired (June 2014) from Atego. This brings together leading capabilities in model-based systems engineering (MBSE), requirements engineering, test/validation management, and product-line modeling.
I’d like to describe a little bit of each portion of the solution (Design, Reuse, and Validate) to give you a sense of what the solution has to offer.
In Design, we focus on the systems design process which covers:
- Capturing and managing the complete system and product requirements
- Collaboratively designing the system specification using standard modeling notations
- Analyzing the design options to define the functional areas of the entire product
For Reuse, product line engineering is the main topic implement by:
- Reusing all requirements, models, and tests across design projects or products
- Architecting a modular system or system of systems design which can be reused
- Designing a family of sub-systems which includes both commonality and variation
To Validate, the product we handle this through:
- Automating the design (both models and requirements) review process early on
- Capturing and managing the test cases and related test results
- Capturing and visualizing traceability across the design artifacts
- Utilizing systems engineering best practices for compliance and governance
I am excited about the entire offering we can provide to our customers. Today, PTC is the only PLM vendor that brings together system requirements, system modeling and validation. It’s only through this end-to-end approach that customers can scale their product and product line engineering practices to meet the systems engineering challenges of today and tomorrow. I know what we have defined will help address our customer’s needs.
Learn more about the PTC Systems Engineering Solution.
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Filed under: Integrity Tagged: systems engineering
