The world is more interconnected than ever which emerge new complexity for organizations and their enterprises. Systems thinking is an accepted approach to deal with the messy interconnected problems of complexity but is sometimes difficult to tailor for a real‐world problem. The paper's objective is to represent the problem using systems thinking approach. This paper focuses on applying systems thinking on a real‐world problem where the underlying problems are unknown with a case study of a transformer management system (TMS) within an enterprise of a worldwide organization (the umbrella of enterprises). The paper starts out by diversifying the use of systems thinking, systems engineering and traditional engineering to present why this approach where selected. Following is a practical methodology using interviews to find the interconnection of the enterprises and a study of the TMS's current state. The interconnections are graphically displayed through a systemigram used to bring the enterprise on “the same page”. The result of this effort is a fishbone diagram to display several possible underlying issues found to the problem, the fishbone diagram's intention is to help the enterprise for selecting what problems to focus on and their order. The paper found the systemigram as a useful tool as it promoted discussions and debate within the enterprise which resulted in a more defined problem overview. To visually display the overview, a cause‐and‐effect diagram where selected. The cause‐and‐effect diagram showed to be an efficient tool to simplify the problems and to be used for communicating them along with the systemigram.

Managing mature products with high variability is an increasing concern for industrial companies. Product variability affects the operational streamlining efforts from product design to production, inventory, selling, and service. In this research, we follow a case where the company faces challenges in manufacturing cost and configuration of both existing and new variants. The purpose of this study is to investigate how product portfolio mapping can structure technical product data to ease the challenges. We analyzed more than 13,000 sales orders executed between 1997‐2019 of a mature sub‐system with large variability. We used Systems Architecting principles in combination with requirements from manufacturing and logistics to create a generic architecture that allows variability in the manufacturing flow. We added interface mapping, the manufacturing view, and the logistic view to enhance product portfolio analysis found in literature. We found significant improvements in both configuration time and the cost prediction accuracy. The company evaluated this research as an overall quality improvement that standardizes the workflow and remove existing bottlenecks.