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Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the application of business process reengineering (BPR) and benchmarking principles to redesign an undergraduate course on BPR to achieve continuous improvements. The principles are applied on a course on BPR in the curriculum of engineering management (EM) program at Stevens Institute of Technology. The EM program aims to provide the students the knowledge and skills, which are necessary to work effectively at the interface between technology, management, and engineering. BPR course (EM435) is recently added to EM program's curriculum to support the need for providing the bridge between the engineering of systems and business operations. Design/methodology/approach-The research approach design is laid out from the time the EM435 course is first offered in the fall of 2006 to the senior year EM students. The students are surveyed and areas of redesign and improvements are identified based on benchmarking against ABET criteria and their associated outcomes, student expectations, similar academic courses, and industry expectations of skills and knowledge. Findings-The identification of the improvement areas in the BPR curriculum leads to a continuous process improvement (CPI) initiative, which has been continued in a more structured manner. Research findings indicate a strong support for more case studies, use of BPR tool, and real-life project in their investigation of effective pedagogy for teaching BPR to engineering undergraduates. Research limitations/implications-This paper demonstrates the value of applying benchmarking and CPI methodology in maintaining effective teaching and learning of BPR concepts. More empirical metrics can be developed in future to measure the success of course, improvements. Practical implications-The findings of this research will promote adoption of courses on BPR and lay a foundation for BPR curriculum in engineering. The CPI approach will provide opportunities to analyze improvements over a period of time. Originality/value-This paper is unique in its application of benchmarking and CPI for improving BPR curriculum at an undergraduate engineering level.

Systems Engineering (SE) has been traditionally viewed as an extremely rigorous approach for having resource intensive processes often perceived to involve bureaucratic decision making; therefore, deemed to be affordable only by large companies and government institutions. However, in recent years, the commercial industry is trying to leverage the benefits of SE by selecting the relevant aspects that apply to them and customising SE to a leaner and compressed version. This paper explores the suitability and the feasibility of rapid approaches and techniques to the existing SE processes. More specifically, this paper describes 22 techniques of rapid systems engineering (RSE) during the design and implementation processes, relevant to those processes and lessons learned. These techniques are applied to the 14 SE processes as illustrated by the SE standard-ISO 15288. An exploratory survey was developed by the authors based on the SE process activities as per ISO 15288 to evaluate application utilising a rapid approach in current projects from various industries. This paper provides conclusions to applying rapid techniques to the SE processes based on existing literature and the experiences of the projects surveyed. It concludes with a discussion of potential research projects for the evaluation of RSE.

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Systems Integration (SI) is an important element of Systems Engineering. It involves the integration of hardware, software, products, services, processes, and humans. The ever‐increasing scale of complexity of systems and its impact on the business requires that we revisit the processes involved in the development and integration of a system. This paper proposes a Systems Integration Process Model (SIPM) based on a comprehensive lifecycle view of systems integration. As part of the ongoing SI research at Stevens Institute of Technology, the authors have developed a Systems Integration Framework (SIF) which incorporates the relevant aspects of integration from a lifecycle perspective and sets a foundation to an end‐to‐end approach to SI. Our end‐to‐end approach focuses on how integration issues can be addressed up‐front to minimize integration related complexities and challenges later on in the system engineering process. This paper discusses the merits and benefits of applying the SIPM to evaluate and improve current SI processes in organizations. The paper provides, in addition to an overview of the SI framework, the activities included in the model. The model was pilot tested to evaluate the SI processes at a government agency. The results were used to provide recommendations for SI process reengineering. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng