• Systems Engineering Best Practices

Organisations are continuously pressured to launch new products and services to gain competitive advantage and satisfy highly demanding global market. And most of this pressure is directed towards product development teams, where majority of organisations still follow traditional or so called stage-gate processes. Although stage-gate process works, it is not flexible enough and tends to constrain creativity and innovation. One paradigm that can help you bridge this gap and is becoming increasingly more popular (particularly in the last 5 to 6 years) is called Set-Based Concurrent Engineering or shorter SBCE. WHAT IS SET-BASED CONCURRENT ENGINEERING?

Systems Engineering Best Practices

Set-Based Concurrent Engineering is a product development approach which offers an environment that not only permits but encourages radical innovation, increased learning and reuse of knowledge, reduces the development risk, and enable shorter and less costly development cycles. One of the most common definitions amongst practitioners is that SBCE is an approach where multifunctional team(s) ideates, develops and communicates sets of conceptual solutions in parallel. As the solutions progress, team(s) builds-up the understanding, knowledge and evidence about the sets, which permits them to gradually narrow these sets by eliminating inferior or/and infeasible solutions. As they narrow, teams commit to staying within the sets so that others can rely on them. This definition is depicted in the below image, where each bubble represent a different subsystem set of concepts. Visual representation of the SBCE (convergence) process across different subsystems While the image above displays the convergence process of different subsystems, similar approach can be adopted for conceptual solutions within each subsystem set. The schematic below shows how an initial set of ideas is developed, screened, and converged through time, based on the knowledge gained.