Why Successful Manufacturing Organizations are Investing in Systems Lifecycle Management

This report discusses how complexity is driving systems engineering adoption, explores MBSE across engineering domains and for downstream architecture collaboration, and highlights MBSE for detailed design and simulation traceability. Ultimately, the report concludes that companies that invest in Systems Lifecycle Management (SysLM) can create a single digital thread that optimizes the design and development process. By implementing MBSE and PLM integration alongside one another, organizations realize greater benefits by designing high-quality products, meeting tight deadlines, and staying within budget.

Mitigating the Impact of Complexity on Manufacturing

While single design domains were adequate for decades, in today’s manufacturing environment, software and electronics have become vital features of almost every system. Because of this complexity, waiting until the end of design to integrate these components is no longer an option. Instead, engineers from all domains—mechanical, electrical, and software—must work closely together to integrate their design work to ensure that all requirements are met and the resulting system is fully functional.

In order to manage increasing product complexity, many organizations are turning to systems engineering. Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary approach to facilitating the design, integration, and management of complex systems over the product lifecycle. While there are challenges associated with traditional systems engineering, many organizations now take an MBSE approach to product design and development. This methodology leverages digital models of systems that allow engineers to create optimized product architectures, which can associate requirements, functions, logical architectures, and physical architectures across the design and development process. This approach enables organizations to more effectively communicate changes and prevent errors that too often occur when integration occurs late in the design phase.

More Systematic, Synergistic, and Structured Workflows

Historically, the MBSE approach has been specialized for each individual engineering discipline, with each domain developing its own model. However, when companies integrate MBSE models with PLM solutions, forming SysLM, they are in a much

better position to optimize limited time and resources for their product programs. The conclusion of this report was that organizations that invest in SysLM will see numerous benefits that will help them manage increasingly complex product requirements—as well as enhanced efficiency, reduced risk, lower costs, and improved quality and reliability of their products.

These kinds of benefits are possible because SysLM promotes a more systematic, synergistic, and structured workflow to product development and management, from the very start of product planning, through simulation and requirements verification, and forward to production and manufacturing. Additionally, when organizations leverage SysLM, they can better ensure that all stakeholders are working with the most up-to-date design information and prevent the challenges inherent to collaborating across multiple MBSE architectures. This democratizes data and ensures that all engineers, regardless of domain, are working from the same single source of truth.

Recommendations for Adopting Systems Lifecycle Management

For organizations looking to implement SysLM, this Lifecycle Insights report determined that integrating MBSE models, detailed design artifacts, systems simulation, and PLM resulted in companies that are in a much better position to optimize limited time and resources for their product programs.

When companies are already using MBSE models in different engineering domains, they may benefit from adopting SysLM. The first step in determining whether to adopt SysLM is to assess the amount of duplication in requirements and functions, and then, explore the impact of MBSE solutions that allow for synchronization between models used in different engineering domains. Reviewing this information can help determine if SysLM is the proper solution for an organization’s engineering challenges.

Additionally, companies are encouraged to determine how stakeholders throughout the organization access and collaborate around systems simulation results. From this information, organizations can explore integrations between MBSE solutions, systems simulation solutions, and PLM to pull together a complete, accessible view of digital validation to accelerate development. As revealed in this report, a key benefit of SysLM is that when MBSE data is democratized through PLM and MBSE models are synchronized across design domains, stakeholders across the lifecycle and across design domains have access to a single, synchronized architecture spanning the entire system. This source of truth results in a center point for collaboration for all, which increases the successful achievement of product development goals.

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Lifecycle Insights is a trusted research, advisory, and publishing firm providing data-driven insights. We publish research, educational, and advisory insights on technology-led engineering initiatives, enabling better investment and adoption decisions. In addition, we work with companies to provide services for initiative decision-making, campaign content, go-to-market strategy, and product strategy.