This paper provides a foundation for modeling the set of activities and their relationships by which systems are engineered, or, more broadly, by which products and services are developed. It provides background, motivations, and formal definitions for process modeling in this specialized environment. We treat the process itself as a kind of system that can be engineered. However, while product systems must be created, the process systems for developing complex products must, to a greater extent, be discovered and induced. Then, they tend to be reused, either formally as standard processes, or informally by the workforce. We distinguish and clarify several important concepts in modeling processes, including: product development versus repetitive business processes, descriptive versus prescriptive processes, activities as actions versus deliverables as interactions, standard versus deployed processes, centralized versus decentralized process modeling, “as is” versus “to be” process modeling, and multiple phases in product development. We also present a basically simple yet highly extendable and generalized framework for modeling product development processes. The framework enables building a single model to support a variety of purposes, including project planning (scheduling, budgeting, resource loading, and risk management) and control, and it provides the scaffolding for knowledge management and organizational learning, among numerous other uses. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 9: 104–128, 2006

There is no engineering of successful systems without any changes; they are the rule and not the exception in product development. To uncover the problems, rationales and goals associated with changes during the life cycle of a system, an exploratory case study in German industry was conducted. Causes and reasons for changes are described, as well as five strategies to cope with changes and the related methods. One example will show how to successfully prevent and front-load changes. Though the preferred strategies to cope with changes are prevention and front-loading, it is concluded that, in today's dynamic business environments, changes are necessary to stay competitive. Therefore, it is proposed to make late changes cost-efficient by implementing changeability within system architectures. Managing changes has to be understood as a major practice for developing successful systems.

Technologies are a critical issue within product development, since technologies are the foundation for successful products. Technology development has suffered from a fuzzy innovation process based on trial and error in a high-pressure product development environment, often leaving no time for real innovation. Technologies developed under these circumstances seldom become superior, robust, mature and flexible-the criteria that are critical for technologies to provide competitive advantage. In this paper the idea is developed of a steady technology stream that is both separated from and appropriately integrated with the downstream product development. This enables companies to supply their product development programs with winning technologies at the right time. A four-phase process framework to support and catalyze the technology development cycle is introduced and described. The proposed framework is based on an integration of six major development methodologies and aims at providing competitive advantage to companies by emphasizing superior, robust, mature, and flexible technologies.

In this paper, a comprehensive systems modeling approach is introduced, that is intended to embrace, structure, model, and interrelate information that is considered to be essential for product development systems. In order to achieve an integrated development of products, processes, organizations, and goals, the use of the ZOPH method is proposed. It applies one consistent modeling language to the entire development system (and its environment). Therefore, the resulting ZOPH-Model supports an easy generation and handling of interfaces and interrelationships, which is crucial for the successful management of increasingly complex systems.

Abstract. The development process has to be modeled and documented for its reengineering and continuous improvement. A development process model is the basis for how a system will be designed. Due to the special nature of integrated product development processes, a method for process modeling has to be able to support and easily map the high interconnectivity between processes of different engineering disciplines over all hierarchies. The dominant elements in a model of integrated product development processes are the informational relations and flows.The analysis of models and textual documentation of the engineering processes in an automotive company revealed the special need for modeling concurrent engineering processes. Existing methods didn't support these needs sufficiently. Therefore, a single method for mapping and interconnecting the processes of all different engineering disciplines was agreed upon, which describes inputs and outputs (e.g. informational objects) for every process.The paper describes the reasons for an engineering process driven modeling method, the method itself and its application. Also, lessons learned from this approach are described.