National and international adoption of systems engineering

Systems engineering has become indispensable to those areas of specialised engineering and manufacturing which have had to grapple with the creation of large and complex systems. There is a demand for the introduction into a wide range of organisations of what is called a `systems engineering process´, but is in fact a closely-linked set of processes, human skills and tools which together lead to a collective capability to undertake systems engineering. How this might look in a well-ordered organisation is discussed in the first part of the paper, and the pragmatic issues involved in introducing such a scheme touched upon. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, we may view the same issues at national and international levels, where the capability of a whole group of enterprises to operate coherently together-often working across national boundaries-determines the viability of major projects. We are seeing the creation of extended enterprises, in the form of prime-contractor-led supply chains, customer-supplier integrated project teams or international consortia (or even combinations of all three). A survey was undertaken for the UK Defence and Aerospace community which looked at the national ability to sustain such activities in this sector, which has traditionally led the way in advanced systems engineering and makes a vital contribution to wealth creation. The results have been published in the form of an agenda for national action. A review of the main conclusions forms the basis of the second part of the paper, which is followed by a brief discussion of the general points arising