Systems Engineering

Solutions for Customer Needs Management – Delivering Products that Customers Will Buy

With the release of Teamcenter 2005, Teamcenter now offers new capabilities for systems engineering, requirements engineering and requirements management. The Systems Architect solution gives the people responsible for planning the integrated mechanical, electrical and software product design a powerful tool to create and communicate requirements. The Requirements Management solution delivers product requirements to all of the entitled users who participate in your product lifecycle. With the Systems Engineering suite, Teamcenter brings your customers directly into your extended enterprise and reflects their concerns from the start of your product lifecycle to its conclusion, delivering “customer needs management,” or products that customers will buy.

Requirements Management connected to the product lifecycle

Product requirements are the common language for communicating your products' customer, marketing, and regulatory expectations. Very few products can be planned, designed, tested, manufactured, sold, delivered, and supported by a single organization or discipline.

Many enterprises use a variety of methods to create and maintain marketplace and customer requirements, including spreadsheets, custom-built databases and document-oriented tracing tools. These approaches typically result in isolated requirements being retained across multiple computers, in diverse documents that nobody reads, behind user interfaces that require a lengthy learning curve or in databases that do not reflect a product-related context.

Effective communications of requirements across your extended enterprise is crucial for optimizing your product lifecycle and delivering products that customers will buy (customer needs management). Everyone who participates in your product lifecycle needs to know what your customers want if your products are going to succeed in today's demanding marketplaces.

Teamcenter’s Requirements Management solution “liberates requirements” by providing a connected requirements management environment that directly links product requirements to the digital environment that developers use to design and validate your products. Maintaining up-to-date product requirements is one thing; having them influence product design is another. Teamcenter’s Requirements Management solution derives its power from Teamcenter and its ability to connect product requirements into the product development cycle. This connection enables an enterprise’s continually updated requirements to influence design decisions while development is actually happening.

Engineering the correct set of requirements

Capturing and communicating requirements is only one piece of the Teamcenter solution for customer needs management. UGS believes that the only way to ensure that you have the right set of requirements is to map your requirements to the problem that you are trying to solve. Given that issue, it becomes extremely important to answer the following fundamental question:

Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary approach to product realization that enables you to understand each of your products as a whole – and better architect the processes you use to plan, develop, manufacture and sustain your products. Companies leverage systems engineering to model/analyze the interactions between a product’s requirements, subsystems, constraints and components and optimize the tradeoffs that drive crucial decisions across the entire product lifecycle. Throughout that lifecycle, systems engineers use a variety of models and tools to capture, organize, prioritize, deliver, and manage systems information; for example at the front-end, systems engineering may capture and prioritize customer requirements through such techniques as QFD, House of Quality, Design for Six Sigma (DFSS), TRIZ and others; then on to alternative evaluation, down to function and physical allocation using function modeling, object-oriented approaches, state charts, etc. Teamcenter provides a number of these capabilities out of the box, but with its open architecture, it provides an enterprise product development framework upon which a variety of tools and methods can be used to capture and analyze those requirements and then deliver them throughout the lifecycle.

With Teamcenter’s Systems Architect solution, UGS delivers a first-of-its-kind requirements engineering environment that companies can use to apply systems engineering concepts to product development. By combining System Architect's holistic approach with Teamcenter’s knowledge and process management, you can understand your products in their entirety and optimize the tradeoffs that have to be made throughout a decision-intensive development cycle.