A guide to combining two powerful management techniques totransform any business organization into a masterpiece of businessefficiency. Lester Dean Thurow, Dean of MIT's Sloan School ofManagement, recently stated that benchmarking combined with processengineering will be the most important management technique of the1990s. Now, in this groundbreaking book, Gregory Watson describeshow top corporations worldwide have already successfullyimplemented that powerful cutting-edge technique--which he calls"business systems engineering"--to promote continuous improvement.More importantly, he clearly demonstrates how you can do the samein your organization. * Introduces business systems engineering, a dynamic new approachto rethinking and redesigning business processes to achievedramatic improvements in quality, cost, service, speed, andmore * Offers clear guidelines for using business systems engineeringtechniques to make your organization more dynamic, productive, andable to adapt to change in today's global marketplace * Incorporates key aspects of TQM, business process improvement,policy deployment, industrial engineering, teamwork, problemsolving, and information technology into one holistic system * Includes business systems engineering success stories, includingthose at Compaq, United Services Automobile Association andMotorola, as well as a survey of the effect of systems changeacross the global automobile industry

A very large proportion of commercial and industrial concerns in the UK find their business competitiveness dependent on huge quantities of already installed, legacy IT. Often the nature of their business is such that, to remain competitive, they have to be able to change their business processes. Sometimes the required change is radical and revolutionary, but more often the required change is incremental. For such incremental change, a major systems engineering problem arises. The cost and delay involved in changing the installed IT to meet the changed business requirements is much too high. In order to address this issue the UK Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) set up, in 1996, a managed research programme entitled Systems Engineering for Business Process Change (SEBPC). I was appointed as co-ordinator of the programme. The overall aim of this new managed research programme was to release the full potential of IT as an enabler of business process change, and to overcome the disabling effects which the build-up of legacy systems has on such change. As such, this aim addressed a stated objective of the Information Technology and Computer Science (IT&CS) part of EPSRC to encourage research at a system level.

Systems Engineering for Business Process Change: New Directions is a collection of papers resulting from an EPSRC managed research programme set up to investigate the relationships between Legacy IT Systems and Business Processes. The papers contained in this volume report the results from the projects funded by the programme, which ran between 1997 and 2001. An earlier volume, published in 2000, reported interim results. Bringing together researchers from diverse backgrounds in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering and Business Schools, this book explores the problems experienced by IT-dependent businesses that have to implement changing business processes in the context of their investment in legacy systems. The book presents some of the solutions investigated through the collaborations set up within the research programme. Whether you are a researcher interested in the ideas that were generated by the research programme, or a user trying to understand the nature of the problems and their solutions, you cannot fail to be inspired by the writings contained in this volume.

Due to growing concern about the competitiveness of industry in the international marketplace and the efficiency ofgovernment enterprises, widespread initiatives are currently underway to enhance thecompetitive posture offirms and to streamline government operations. Nearly all enterprises are engaged in assessing ways in which their productivity, product quality and operations can be improved. These efforts canbe described as Business Process Engineering (BPE). BPE had its roots in industry under differing titIes: Process Improvement, Process Simplification, Process Innovation, Reengineering, etc. It has matured to be an important ingredient of successful enterprises in the private and public sectors. After extensive exploitation by industrial and governmental practitioners and consultants, it is attracting increasing attention from academics in the fields of engineering and business. However, even with all of this attention in the popular literature, serious scholarly literature on BPE is in short supply. TItis is somewhat surprising, especially since so many large international organizations have attempted BPE projectswith varied success.

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Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Human Systems Engineering and Design (IHSED2021): Future Trends and Applications, September 23–25, 2021, University of Dubrovnik, Croatia

For the last century, the automotive industry has been dominated by internal combustion engines. Their flexibility of application, driving range, performance and sporty characteristics has resulted in several generations of this technology and has formed generations of engineers. But that is not the end of the story. Stricter legislation and increased environmental awareness have resulted in the development of new powertrain technologies in addition and parallel to the highly optimized internal combustion engine. Hybrid powertrains systems, pure battery electric systems and fuel cell systems, in conjunction with a diverse range of applications, have increased the spectrum of powertrain technologies. Furthermore, automated driving together with intelligent and highly connected systems are changing the way to get from A to B. Not only is the interaction of all these new technologies challenging, but also several different disciplines have to collaborate intensively in order for new powertrain systems to be successfully developed. These new technologies and the resulting challenges lead to an increase in system complexity. Approaches such as systems engineering are necessary to manage this complexity. To show how systems engineering manages the increasing complexity of modern powertrain systems, by providing processes, methods, organizational aspects and tools, this book has been structured into five parts. Starting with Challenges for Powertrain Development, which describes automotive-related challenges at different levels of the system hierarchy and from different point of views. The book then continues with the core part, Systems Engineering, in which all the basics of systems engineering, model-based systems engineering, and their related processes, methods, tools, and organizational matters are described. A special focus is placed on important standards and the human factor. The third part, Automotive Powertrain Systems Engineering Approach, puts the fundamentals of systems engineering into practice by adding the automotive context. This part focuses on system development and also considers the interactions to hardware and software development. Several approaches and methods are presented based on systems engineering philosophy. Part four, Powertrain Development Case Studies, adds the practical point of view by providing a range of case studies on powertrain system level and on powertrain element level and discusses the development of hybrid powertrain, internal combustion engines, e-drives, transmissions, batteries and fuel cell systems. Two case studies on a vehicle level are also presented. The final part, Outlook, considers the development of systems engineering itself with particular focus on information communication technologies. Even though this book covers systems engineering from an automotive perspective, many of the challenges, fundamental principles, conclusions and outlooks can be applied to other domains too. Therefore, this book is not only relevant for automotive engineers and students, but also for specialists in scientific and industrial positions in other domains and anyone who has to cope with the challenge of successfully developing complex systems with a large number of collaborating disciplines.