Industry Summary Articles

BigLever Software today announced that the company’s CEO, Dr. Charles Krueger, was selected by the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) to lead the development of new ISO standards for Feature-based PLE. Krueger will play an instrumental role in bringing together experts from across the globe to develop a disciplined, structured set of standards that can be applied to help engineering organizations implement the most efficient, effective and proven modern PLE approaches. 

“Feature-based PLE is emerging as one of the foremost areas of innovation within the systems engineering field today,” said Krueger. “These new ISO standards will clearly define the modern PLE approaches that are enabling the industry’s most notable PLE success stories. Feature-based PLE provides a fully unified, automated approach across engineering and operations disciplines, tools and processes – allowing organizations to create and bring more product innovations to market faster, more efficiently, and more competitively.” 

INCOSE is a not-for-profit organization that develops and promotes the interdisciplinary principles and practices that advance systems engineering and enable successful systems implementations. Over the past few years, INCOSE’s leadership has recognized the growing importance of PLE in the systems engineering arena. This ISO standards development initiative further underscores the significance of Feature-based PLE as a key enabler for leading-edge systems engineering practices. 

“Product Line Engineering has become a critical technology that will have broad impact across the systems engineering field,” said Dr. Gina Guillaume-Joseph, assistant director, Standards Initiatives, INCOSE. “It is important to the community that we facilitate awareness and understanding of the latest PLE approaches and proven best practices. We are excited to have industry leader and PLE pioneer Dr. Krueger leading our effort to establish the new Feature-based PLE standards, as well as helping to promote their widespread adoption.” 

As market demand for product sophistication and diversity continues to grow, companies face new levels of systems engineering complexity. It is not unusual for engineering teams to spend as much as two-thirds of their time dealing with the mundane tasks of managing the mounting complexity of product variation. PLE addresses product complexity by dramatically simplifying the creation, delivery, maintenance, and evolution of a product line portfolio. Feature-based PLE enables a unified approach across the full lifecycle, from portfolio planning to multi-discipline asset engineering, product marketing, manufacturing, sales, and service. By providing a “single source of feature truth,” modern PLE enables a holistic view into the feature variations for a product family, eliminating the need for different variant management mechanisms across the organization.

The new PLE standards will delineate the specialization of state-of-the-art PLE approaches where featured-based automation is used to remove the complexities that existed with early-generation PLE techniques. These techniques, such as asset cloning, branching and merging, created barriers to PLE adoption in the past.

To view the original press release, please click here.

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