High Impact Process Benchmarking For Systems Engineering Improvements

System Engineering within Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation (SAC) is an interdisciplinary approach emphasizing the overall rotorcraft system performance and the total rotorcraft ownership costs. This approach is embodied in the System Engineering (SE) Organizational Standard Process (OSP), ensuring integration across functional disciplines, technology domains, and specialty engineering addressing the entire life cycle of our products. Minimization of the total ownership costs is achieved through life-cycle considerations focusing on high impact process areas such as the Requirements Development (RD), Requirements Management (RM), and the formal Decision Analysis and Resolution (DAR or Trade Studies) process areas. Although the SAC SE OSP is adequately defined, focused high impact process benchmarking was used as a means to identify and prioritize further process improvements including tool selection and adoption within the SE organization. The primary purpose of benchmarking was to identify, share, and use knowledge and best practices to improve the RD, RM, and DAR process areas. Our process included careful selection of the benchmarking questions and of the benchmarking participants. Benchmarking responses were analyzed, rated according to established criteria, and the results were rolled up for a variety of briefing purposes. Organizational process improvements were discussed and a plan was generated. This paper will discuss the benchmarking of high impact SE OSP process areas, including an outline of the benchmarking process, the results of the benchmarking, and recommendations for consideration in developing improvement plans for high impact process areas.