{"id":30281,"date":"2018-07-17T11:11:54","date_gmt":"2018-07-17T18:11:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jamasoftware.com\/?p=30281"},"modified":"2024-10-03T10:20:29","modified_gmt":"2024-10-03T17:20:29","slug":"feature-based-product-line-engineering-translating-engineering-gains-into-strategic-business-value","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jamasoftware.com\/legacy\/blog\/2018\/07\/17\/feature-based-product-line-engineering-translating-engineering-gains-into-strategic-business-value\/","title":{"rendered":"Feature-Based Product Line Engineering: Translating Engineering Gains into Strategic Business Value (Part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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This is the first of a two-part series of guests post about Product Line Engineering (PLE) from our friends at BigLever Software<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

PLE is the engineering of a product line portfolio using a shared set of engineering assets, a managed set of features and an automated means of production. By “engineer,” we mean all of the activities involved in planning, producing, delivering, sustaining and retiring products. <\/em><\/p>\n

PLE provides a way to take full and ongoing advantage of the commonality shared across a product family, while efficiently and systematically managing the variation or differences.<\/em><\/p>\n

Managing a portfolio as a single entity with variation, as opposed to a multitude of separate products, brings enormous efficiencies in the development, production, maintenance and evolution of a product line portfolio.<\/p>\n

The engineering improvements enabled by PLE are resulting in dramatic reductions in engineering cost and time-to-market, and order-of-magnitude improvements in productivity, product line scalability and product quality.<\/p>\n

As PLE has evolved into an industrial-strength engineering discipline, modern state-of-the-art approaches \u2014 known as \u201cFeature-based\u201d PLE \u2014 have emerged to enable the industry\u2019s most notable success stories. Feature-based PLE has been acknowledged as one of the foremost areas of innovation within the systems engineering field by INCOSE (International Council on Systems Engineering).<\/p>\n

INCOSE<\/a> is leading the development of new ISO standards for Feature-based PLE, in an effort to clearly delineate a disciplined, structured set of standards that can be applied to help engineering organizations adopt and successfully implement these proven approaches. BigLever Software is working in conjunction with INCOSE to support and facilitate this standards development.<\/p>\n

This two-part article series explores the underlying concepts central to Feature-based PLE and illustrates how it provides a unified, automated approach.<\/p>\n

In this article, Part 1, we provide a view into the \u201cFeature-based PLE factory,\u201d which is a foundational concept in the new ISO standards under development, as well as the underpinning of BigLever’s PLE approach.<\/p>\n

And, we will also address why this innovative engineering paradigm is being adopted by a growing number of forward-thinking organizations across a spectrum of industries such as automotive, defense, aerospace, aviation, industrial systems and beyond.<\/p>\n

The Product Line Engineering Factory<\/strong><\/p>\n

The underpinning of Feature-based PLE is the creation of a \u201cPLE factory.\u201d Briefly, a PLE factory comprises:<\/p>\n