Preface

The availability of effective global communication facilities nowadays has changed the business goals and practices of many enterprises that are developers of complex engineering products such as an aircraft or a frigate. They need to remain competitive by developing innovative products and processes that are specific to individual customer’s requirements, completely packaged and made available globally to make best use of resources within defined constraints. The complexity of these engineering products also means the need for developing a different set of knowledge that includes the following:

In some cases, due to regulatory and institutional requirements, consideration is also required for decommissioning.

In the acquisition phase, user requirements are not normally clear. The design of systems can vary greatly between different vendors and concepts. In many cases, several consortia are involved, each bringing their own expertise and expectations. The challenge to the system acquisition team is to establish suitable baseline for comparing different proposals. In order to make a fair judgement to different designs, the acquisition needs to apply modelling methods and analysis tools to assist in the evaluation and interrogating processes.

The lengthy and complicated acquisition process is further complicated by the increasing expectation that the complex engineering system needs to be in service for years. From the owner’s point of view, asset capability should increase over time to meet changing demands. To achieve this goal, typical support and services after acquisition of the asset should include significant mid-life upgrade and whole of system integrated logistics support. The philosophy of whole of life engineering development and support is to integrate product-design information through to implementation, manufacture, services and decommissioning of the product. Substantial planning is required to enable flexible delivery of services and logistics support to the asset from anywhere in the world.

To address these issues, business systems across company boundaries are formed to operate across time and space with world-wide distributed functions of systems design, testing, validation, manufacturing, sales, customer support, engineering, quality assurance, project management, supply and process chain management, operations control and so on. New business models such as performance-based contracting has emerged in recent years as one of the favourable choices of contracting mechanisms for the public sector and asset-intensive industries such as defence, water, transport and chemicals. Under performance-based contracting, a third-party contractor takes responsibility and risks for the management of a specific part of the business. This compares to traditional maintenance-oriented arrangement where the asset’s capability will inevitably degrade due to age and technology changes.

However, no two systems acquisition and support projects are the same because each system needs to meet different user requirements. Due to the highly individualised nature of the acquisition and support of complex engineering systems, it is an extremely knowledge intensive, labour-rich business that requires the development of new systems in the form of design certification, digital manufacturing, integrated testing, customer-support centres, information infrastructure, human organisations, multi-disciplinary engineering teams, supply chains and distribution networks. Operations of these engineering units in a globally distributed environment present significant challenges to the engineering systems developers.

This book will address the skill set of professional engineers and operations managers required to acquire and support a complex engineering system that is expected to last for a long period of time and to meet increasing demand in capability. This book provides a core knowledge base that draws upon principles derived from a wide range of business and engineering disciplines including systems engineering, services engineering, operations support, integrated logistics, industrial engineering and many others.

The book is intended to be both a special text for relevant courses at university level as well as a general knowledge text book for professional engineers, systems managers, acquisition officers and operations managers to enhance their knowledge in acquisition and support of complex engineering systems. The book is also written with the aim that research students studying in systems engineering, support and services engineering, logistics and procurement will find it useful as an introductory text to start their research aspiration. The broad range of knowledge requirement in acquisition and support demands a broad coverage of both engineering and business perspectives of expensive complex engineering systems. Books in engineering services tend to focus on people management issues, which are not sufficient in diagnosing and managing problems operating engineering systems. This book will:

The book uses case studies and work examples to illustrate the concepts and principles. It will be organised in the chapters that follow further.