Process support for IPPD-enabled systems engineering

In an era of ever-increasing global competition, product development and systems engineering organizations are turning to integrated product-process development (IPPD) and process support technologies to improve cycle times, lower costs, and mitigate risks in system development. IPPD is the concurrent development of a product (i.e., system) along with the processes by which the product is created and supported. This paper describes ProcessIPPD^TM, a methodology and toolkit for process modeling and analysis in support of IPPD-enabled collaborative product development and complex systems engineering. Specifically, this paper presents the core IPPD ontology (i.e., key concepts and relationships), and discusses the applications and benefits of process modeling and analysis in IPPD-enabled systems engineering. A sample case study that illuminates the importance of process modeling and analysis is also presented