All posts by Louwrence

Engineering, Engineering Management, Systems Engineering

Architecture of the engineering organisation

ISSN 2567-6458, 11.April 2019 – 18.February 2021
Email: info@uffmm.org
Author: Louwrence Erasmus
Email: louwrence@erasmus.org.za

For many years I had a problem with the enterprise architecture of a business that performs engineering. For the past two decades I was looking for a framework that can clearly show the uniqueness of the architecture of the engineering organisation (AOTEO).

Systems engineers have talked about parts of the architecture for the engineering organisation through the years, by discussing the creating system (a.k.a. designing system [1]) and the created system (a.k.a. system under design [1]). These two systems are embedded into a context system [1] that provides the environment in which the created system must operate in. Thus in IDEF0 notation, the Creating System delivers the Created System:

IDEF0 for Created and Creating Systems

The Creating System is managed through Engineering Management, that includes project management and technology management for the purposes of this discussion, see below:

IDEF0 for Engineering Management, Creating System and Created System

All the above systems are governed by the Compliance System, see below:

IDEF0 of Compliance, Engineering Management, Created and Creating Systems

The Engineering Enterprise has thus the following high level architecture:

Engineering Enterprise

Created System

The management documents associated with the Created System include, but are not limited to:

  • Manufacturing Plan
  • Delivery Plan
  • Installation and Commissioning Plan
  • Construction Plan
  • Operational Plan
  • Integrated Logistic Support Plan

The compliance for the created system is Quality Assurance. 

Creating System

The management documents typically are, but not limited to:

  • Project Plan
  • Systems Engineering Management Plan
  • Systems Engineering Plan,
  • Engineering Plan,
  • Development Plan,
  • Configuration Management Plan
  • Safety Plan
  • Test Plan

Verification and Validation are the compliance activities for the creating system.

Engineering Management

The management documents are, but not limited to:

  • Business Plan
  • Resource Plan
  • Financial Plan

Governance is the compliance checking for Engineering Management.

Compliance

The typical management documents are:

  • Quality Management Plan
  • Test and Evaluation Management Plan
  • Governance Plan

References

[1] Long, D and Scott, Z (2011) A Primer for Model-Based Systems Engineering, 2nd Edition, Vitech Corporation.