The development of large, complex, heavy construction equipment can be difficult, time consuming and expensive, even more so if the goal is to design a complete site solution. The example used is taken from an ongoing real project named Electric site. The aim is to electrify a transport stage in a quarry – from excavation to primary crushing and transport to secondary crushing. This will reduce the CO2 95% and the total cost of operation 25%. This paper describes how a standards‐based enterprise architecture model can be used to significantly influence continued system engineering efforts as well as the software architecture for the application development. The enterprise architecture model has been developed specifically to ensure overall management of the site. It is this description, created with an enterprise perspective of the site that is used directly to speed up the development of the systems architecture. The model also details the applications that are required as part of the different systems that will support the overall management of the site.

Digitalization has created service business opportunities for machine manufacturing companies. But creating these cyber-physical systems of systems effectively constitutes a critical measure of success in practice. At the same time, the body of knowledge in software engineering provides little guidance on how to manage this evolution. To contribute to closing this gap in the long run via problem-driven research, we need to frst understand which contemporary challenges and needs are encountered in industry. To this end, we conducted a series of semi-structured interviews at a machine manufacturing company, that is expanding its service offerings utilizing digitalization, where we explored how such systems are engineered and what challenges and needs are encountered.

In an ever rapid changing world of today, enterprises cannot leverage only on past success. Striving for an innovation success demands traditional systems engineering methods (i.e. ConOps in our case) to be updated. This study points towards the benefits for such a company to leverage the usage of the ConOps together with the needfinding of a design‐inspired method – design thinking, and therefore introduce the User‐focused ConOps. Through two construction equipment development case studies we show the importance of User‐focused ConOps from it is created until the system validation.