Systems Design Engineering: A Holistic Requirements-led Approach to Concept Design

Many organizations are falling far short of achieving the lifecycle potential of their new product designs. One major source of this suboptimal business performance stems from underleveraging key Systems Engineering and Design Engineering principles in the early phases of the design process. If these are being poorly applied, the following will likely occur:

• Inefficient use of engineering (and other cross-functional) resources
• Unnecessarily high product development costs
• Delayed time-to-market
• Subpar launch quality
• Poor system-level safety
• Suboptimal lifecycle sustainability-related performance
• Compromised design innovation

This report addresses these challenges and articulates how an integrated approach of “Systems Design Engineering” provides nonburdensome and quickly applied methods for overcoming these shortcomings, placing a dedicated focus on the three high-level principles that govern lifecycle product design success. Excellent and efficient performance against each of them is needed to achieve a new product’s lifecycle goals.

1. Holistically understanding the needs and opportunities of a system
2. Efficient development of system-level design concepts with best-in-class potential
3. System-level design concept selection, including effective risk mitigation