Systems engineering for better engineering

The complexities of today´s products and the techniques needed to make them have made systems engineering methods essential to effective competition. The author discusses the rise of Japanese industry and how it overtook the West by using a systems engineering approach. In systems engineering. an uncoordinated, piecemeal enterprise is replaced by a coordinated approach taking a total view of the common system purpose, so that the separate elements are subsumed in the identity of the whole system with its overall measures of performance. The ability of the Japanese to make products of high quality, low cost and strong consumer appeal is based on the application of many methodologies and technologies within a systems engineering approach. The whole activity is supported by the relentless use of kaizen-continuous improvement against benchmark measures of performance. The author discusses some of these processes and looks at the concepts of the business as a system and the product as a system