Merging paradigms: engineering for a managed product life cycle (systems engineering)

Running a successful business in a world of constant change is a great challenge for all enterprises, not least within the manufacturing industry. Globally networked organizations do their best to adjust to new situations in order to launch new products fast and efficiently to a global market with rapidly changing customer preferences and fierce competition. The required speed of product development and production together with continuously evolving enterprise networks and business mergers generates an environment in which long-term strategic planning and well-managed product processes are difficult to establish and maintain. The risk is that processes remain suboptimal, leading to decreased productivity, quality problems and, in the end, higher cost of ownership for the customer. In order to deal with these challenges, a holistic approach must be applied that considers all aspects of the product life cycle from concept to disposal. This must be based on a management system for dealing with product and process data throughout the life cycle.