Speaker: Jonas Mørkeberg Torry-Smith
Venue: Copenhagen (May 21st 2014)

Systems Engineering is a worldwide accepted framework to support multi-disciplinary product development. Historically emerging from large American defense and aerospace project and within that field has proven it effectiveness. Therefore I ask the question of how well the Systems Engineering framework can support multi-disciplinary development in small and medium-sized companies and what tailoring might be needed to benefit from the framework.

Systems Engineering as e.g. proposed in the INCOSE handbook provides structure for activities to perform a top-down approach and it provides a suggestion for a range of documentation to support the execution of a development project. With the right tailoring it will provide a backbone for organizing and carrying out activities in small and medium sized companies.

To tailor the Systems Engineering framework to projects found in these companies some of the proposed activities and documentation should appear in a reduced form while we may need to support the description of the development with more specific activities supporting the synthesis process. The need is to ensure integrating synthesis activities to utilize the potential synergy in letting engineers from different disciplines work together in creating new solutions, while conforming to the Systems Engineering framework. There are methods and tools which support the integration between the disciplines which can be seen as an elaboration of the activities presented in the INCOSE handbook. The following four will be presented:

• The ‘Split Concept’ eases the transition from a common cross-domain functional model to domain-specific models.
• The ‘First and Final Cut’ is a marking along the project execution where the integration is evaluated to ensure increased innovative performance.
• Function allocation and linked strategies provide a tool to divide work packages and define interfaces between the involved engineering disciplines.
• Performing Dependency Management in multi-disciplinary projects.

Bio of the presenter

Jonas Mørkeberg Torry-Smith has been working with international (and Danish) companies as a consultant via IPU-Product Development since 2002 and has performed product development and engineering design-related task and projects. He holds a Ph.D. in multi-disciplinary product development and has published articles in highly renowned international journals and ISI-rated conferences.