[Webinar Recap] Concurrent Engineering in Aerospace and Live Traceability™

Systems Engineering

[Webinar Recap] Concurrent Engineering in Aerospace and Live Traceability™

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[Webinar Recap] Concurrent Engineering in Aerospace and Live Traceability™

In this blog, we recap our webinar, “Concurrent Engineering in Aerospace and Live Traceability™” – Click HERE for the full version.

Concurrent Engineering in Aerospace and Live Traceability™

In this webinar, you will gain an understanding of the essential components of concurrent engineering, which include:

  • The process itself
  • Forming a team with members from different disciplines
  • Utilizing a unified design model
  • Collaborating in a shared workspace
  • Implementing a software tool infrastructure
  • Model-Based-Systems-Engineering (MBSE) and Live Traceability™ for Concurrent Engineering inside Jama Connect

Take this opportunity to discover how to speed the analysis of feasibility, programmatics, risk, and cost in addition to surfacing and resolving technical issues early between a space agency (customer) and contractors (suppliers).

Below is a preview of our webinar. Click HERE to watch it in its entirety.

The following is an abbreviated transcript of our webinar.

Concurrent Engineering in Aerospace and Live Traceability™

Cary Bryczek: A simple agenda for today’s webinar. I’ll begin with explaining just what concurrent engineering is, and then I’ll give you a demonstration of Jama with some ideas for how to adopt those concurrent engineering practices. And then I’ll just open up the floor for some Q&A.

I’ll start by telling you a little bit about my company, Jama Software. We’re the leader in requirements management. Our purpose is to ensure that innovators succeed with client success at the forefront of everything that we do. Through years of industry-specific experience and thousands of client engagements, we provide best practices and pre-built frameworks to help teams manage their product, system, and software requirements with live traceability through the development cycle.

Our clients believe from faster cycle times and speed to market, increased process efficiency, visibility, control and quality, and streamlined reviews, compliance and risk management, all in a single source of truth. Our Jama Connect software and services help teams manage complex development in regulated industries such as medical devices and life sciences, automotive, semiconductor, space systems, airborne & defense, as well as non-regulated industries such as industrial manufacturing, finance, insurance, and software development.

The reality at most companies is that the end-to-end systems development process is fragmented into domain-specific tools and spreadsheets that have no built-in collaboration. This leads to fragmented requirements traceability and requires significant manual effort through emails, meetings, and luck to try and prevent delays, defects, rework, and cost overruns.

RELATED: Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Requirements Management and Traceability Solution for Aerospace

Bryczek: Most companies have come to accept the situation as an unchangeable reality given the lack of a single platform to enable the entire process, nor a method to integrate spreadsheets and desktop tools. Concurrent engineering practices can help solve some of the lack of traceability and communication, but a collaborative requirements tool like Jama is what helps communicate the evidence and make sure what is being developed aligns with the mission, goals, and needs.

Let’s dig in. As defined by the European Space Agency, concurrent engineering is a systematic approach to integrated product development that emphasizes the response to customer expectations. It embodies team values of cooperation, trust, and sharing in such a matter that decision-making is by consensus, involving all perspectives in parallel from the beginning of the product lifecycle.

Traditionally, engineers faced with the task of designing a new complex system or architecture work in sequence, one step at a time, passing the design from one subsystem specialist to the next without interaction with the rest of the team. That’s the traditional, that’s the old style.

As seen in the figure on the left, this sequential engineering begins with customer requirements and then progresses to design implementation, verifications, and maintenance. The approach for sequential engineering results in large amounts of time devoted to product development. This drives higher cost and is less efficient as products can’t be made quickly.

And this is a big deal in the space industry because when we’re in the early phases of mission analysis, you can’t afford to have a really long, lengthy product development. Sequential really just doesn’t make sense. It’s just too expensive and you need to come up with those variants right away.

RELATED: The Essential Guide to Requirements Management and Traceability

Bryczek: So concurrent engineering, on the right, is based on teamwork and focused on a common design model that evolves iteratively in real-time. As the different subsystem experts provide their contributions, designers, and customers agree on requirements and take decisions in real-time to allow the best design for the right cost within the programmatic constraints. So concurrent engineering, it allows for all stages of product development to occur essentially at the same time.

As seen in sequential engineering versus concurrent, the figure in the middle of the screen that you see, initial planning really is the only requirement before the process can occur, including planning, design, implementation, testing, and evaluation. The concurrent design and manufacturing approach allows for shortening that product development time, gives you higher efficiency in developing, and producing the parts earlier, and it lowers those production costs.

The European Space Agency commonly produces a costed, risk-assessed, conceptual space mission or system design complete with various options including the scheduling, testing, and operations in only just a few weeks, and they’ve been doing it a really long time.

We think that concurrent engineering and design manufacturing, it emphasizes parallel types of tasks. So you have an integrated product development approach, some people might call it. It really has it so that where the functions of the design, engineering, and manufacturing are working in parallel at the same time, highly collaborative to bring that new product to market.

Who uses something like concurrent engineering? There’s a lot of people. Space agencies like the European Space Agency and NASA, automotive companies like Toyota and Harley Davidson, contract manufacturing companies, and even large energy and oil companies. There are a lot of organizations out there that are doing it and doing it very successfully.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THIS WEBINAR IN ITS ENTIRETY:
Concurrent Engineering in Aerospace and Live Traceability™

Cary Bryczek
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