Despite the global financial crisis of 2008—or perhaps because of it—there is a new interest in system engineering like never before.

Many small and medium-sized businesses have recently been forced to close. When jobs fold, valuable know-how, accumulated through years of work, is also lost.

The above is especially true for companies in the engineering and design sector. Andromeda Systems Engineering can provide valuable support in growing an engineering and design business.

Andromeda Systems Engineering can provide valuable support in growing an engineering and design business.

To be competitive in industry, it is not enough to cut costs by hiring workers in India. Businesses that succeed offer a high level of maturity , specially related to:

Similarly, global players in the engineering market cannot become market leaders if they don’t have a consolidated methodology for managing project lifecycles. They must manage requirements and test engineering with tools suitable to ensure the full traceability of workflow throughout the project lifecycle.

Relying on Andromeda, you can take advantage of an international team: Andromeda Systems Engineering, composed of experts from Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States, can produce an agile methodology for the complete control of your project lifecycle.

There are many industries that can benefit from systems engineering—a more robust approach to design processes, evoluted from classic project management, and now working in closed sinergy with it.

The most obvious is engineering: the design of systems, plants, and machinery of 21st century industry.

The world of engineering is constantly evolving and growing, and therefore constantly needs to develop and propagate best practices.

But other sectors can benefit as well, such as finance, insurance and social projects at large.

In fact, any project that may be described in terms of requirements, needs development, and can later be verified through testing procedures, can use systems engineering.

Systems engineering is targeted to quickly verify that any product is consistent with its initial requirements, even in areas where it has never been applied before.

The most frequent concern we hear is, "Our projects are not complex enough to require the use of systems engineering.”

That’s not true. Our methodology is useful, even for low complexity projects that require few documents or take only months to complete.

All of the data on your projects are stored in a database, where the information is simple to retrieve: requirements (all levels), risks, risk events, vulnerabilities, risk mitigation actions, test procedures and test reports, test cases, test steps, logged problems, documents, interfaces and input/output signals, action items, events, diary notes,minutes of meetings.

PTESY helps you understand and measure your workflow and identify areas of potential improvement.

But PTESY proves its value when it comes to maintaining the system, adding functionalities, and quickly estimating future projects during bidding stages.

With its easy access to information and its quick retrieval, PTSEY is an invaluable tool.

You can best appreciate systems engineering after reverse engineering a project lifecycle management system that is several years old—and you have to trust the memory of designers and project managers.

Adopting a Systems engineering methodology, and a relational database supporting tools, gives us a solid and secure platform that allows us, at any time, to base our analysis on comprehensive, systematic and quick data selections.

Another concern potential clients say: "My business does not deal with aerospace or defense industry; our clients are not required to comply to quality standards."

First, neither in the aerospace and defense market we can still talk about easy abundant budgets.

However, in this time of economic crisis, the gradual reduction of budgets requires you to rationalize expenses and to adopt streamlined and efficient methodologies.

It is therefore vital to get rid of redundancies and inefficiencies arising from previous standards.

This includes purchasing very complex and expensive tools, making your system difficult, if not impossible, to integrate, and requiring additional huge costs of training and consultancy.

But the practice of managing your project lifecycle nowadays expands far beyond the areas of "traditional" quality.

On the international market, system engineering and our PTESY support tool is vital to public works, transportation, food and beverage supplying, pharmaceutics, and any application where human life depends on systems safety and and reliability.

But both the methodology and the tool can be profitably applied to situations where you need to manage product lifecycles, rather than projects (for example, machinery that requires customization with each client).

The market of the system engineering tools nowadays sees a monopolist, owner of almost 50% of world market share, and a number of smaller players.

None of them – the major nor the smaller players – offers a fully integrated tool.

It means that the user should buy a tool for requirements management, and another one for test engineering, just to start.

Both have proprietary, non integrable, databases. In other words, they are not based upon open commercial databases, such as, e.g., Microsft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, and cannot be interfaced by means of ODBC protocol.

If the user wants to develop traceability, the only possibility is to use scripts to import / export data from one system to another! But there's more.

Usually the user also wants to analyze the project risks, and then develop a mitigation plan: let’s go shopping agin, for a risk management tool.

That makes three of them.

We need to manage problems and action items, thus let’s buy the fourth tool.

Obviously we need a document management .... five.

The system to be designed includes interfaces or input/output signals? Maybe we cannot find on the market a tool for documentation of i/o signals, therefore we shall manage it by Excel or by the SCADA real time database… That make six different procedures...

Add some architectural design tool (CAD, CAE, Katia, UML, SysML, etc ...).

The user already purchased seven different licenses, seven training and/or consultancy, and brought in house a jungle of non integrated and non integrable systems...

As long as you are happy...

To the ones which are not happy to keep on being bled from suppliers still living in the Twentieth Century, or of having to renounce to a project lifecycle management system, Andromeda offers PTESY, the only fully integrated tool, that combines all the essential functions for the control the project lifecycle.

But we didn’t yet describe enough the many advantages of having a multifunctional fully integrated tool.

We should not forget the importance of the used type of database: PTESY uses a commercial standard database, completely open, Microsoft SQL Server.

SQL Server is accessible via ODBC, which means that the data will never be lost, anything can happen to software vendors.

The characteristics of PTESY, compared to competing products, are quite revolutionary!

Take for example the usability. In general, both the requirements management tools and test engineering ones can only be used in shop, by highly specialized technical personnel.

PTESY can be used on LAN, by a wide range of users, both of technical and managerial culture.

Project managers, purchase managers, systems engineers, designers, analysts, developers, test engineers, quality managers, installers, suppliers, customers trainers.

This means giving quality into the hands of designers and managers, overcoming once and for all the twentieth-century paradigm, which wanted the quality exclusively in the hands of " quality experts ".

PTESY is highly scalable, both economically and technically.

The cost of the client licenses decreases in proportion to the growth of the number of licenses, even cumulatively over time: if you bought ten licenses today when you will buy ten more licenses in a year the discount will be calculated on twenty licenses.

Regarding the technique scalability, the only limit to the concurrent accesses to database is determined by Microsoft SQL Server, since the whole Software resides on the client machine, thus no "bottlenecks" exist on the server.

The total integration on a single database, allows the total traceability, among all levels of requirements, among test cases and covered requirements, among logged problems and violated requirements, etc. ...

Furthermore, each methodology object can be referred to any other methodology object.

It depends on how much users already have previous experience in systems engineering, the number of people who are dedicated to design, test and, quality control, and how deep the corporate’s management is willing to innovate and restruct their design processes.

Optimally, the design team has already designated different responsibilities for project management and for system engineering teams.

The project management division would be responsible for the management of orders, contracts with customers, contracts with subcontractors, and all aspects of commitment financial control and human resources management.

The system engineering division would be responsible for developing requirements, risk mitigation, verification of compliance of the developed product with its requirements, and all processes concerning the quality of the developed system.

The system engineering team should have previous experience with the standards of the area where the company operates.

If this is the case, brief training will be enough to set up the first project, and system engineers can quickly transition to the new environment. If necessary, users may receive more coaching on methodology optimization.

Another scenario includes one in which the user has previous experience of use of system engineering methodologies and/or other standards, but the company does not have separate project management and system engineering divisions.

In this case it will be necessary a new strategic approach, to either restructure the design team or to designate different responsibilities for different processes.

Again, we are able to support the corporate’s management, suggesting structure for new operative divisions, as well as train users on our system.

Methodological innovation is never a plain nor easy process, and should be approached involving all the interested personnel, with proper experience and cultural background, including – and not rejecting – their best practices. All of that is our normal job, that you can take advantage of.

But we can also help forward your business when your users have no previous experience with systems engineering.

In this case, the user company will need a thorough auditing of their design practices.

Indeed, your team may already be familiar with some of these criteria without even being aware of them.

It may be enough to just systematize processes according to the most appropriate standards of your industry.

With a background that includes work in both the public and private sectors, Andromeda Systems Engineering can provide support for both European and American standards.

In fact, we can help you achieve an higher business maturity degree: CMMi Level III!

We are also available to provide consultancy services for project lifecycle management, general project management, and to meet, by our consultants, any shortages of personnel the user could be facing.