Systems Thinking & Engineering - Transformation of Industrial Organizations with a System Perspective

In the context of manufacturing industries, Systems Engineering as an engineering methodology and approach helps companies to engineer their products and services with a holistic perspective across all phases of the lifecycle. This perspective often leads to new product-system architectures because of a more extensive understanding of design decisions impacts. To get such new methodologies of engineering effectively up and running, companies need to transform their organization – especially their engineering & development departments.

On its own Digital Transformation journey, across many areas and business units, Siemens continuously transforms its own organization and strengthens the business capabilities in Systems Engineering & Thinking. In this presentation, industrial experiences and insights are shared how an industrial manufacturer drives its transformation from education to R&D departments and across supporting functions of the entire organization with the help of a System Thinking perspective.

In particular, the “Systems Engineering Domain Concept” is introduced. It represents an approach to establish Systems Engineering as a network organization within an industrial organization, which supports the transformation across organizational boundaries and silos. Finally, as part of the necessary people involvement & enablement, a training and education is presented, combined. with insights of impacts and challenges throughout the transformation.