systems engineering
Systems engineering is a crucial aspect of research and development and must not be neglected. A complex product may have many sub-systems that have to work well together. Often trade-offs have to be made to optimize overall performance. There are many choices for the system architecture and the ability to pick the right one is important. Redundancy and fault tolerance have to be factored in for mission critical or safety critical systems. Simply copying the architecture of another system may be a mistake.
Another aspect of systems engineering is understanding the underlying scientific principles enough to optimize the overall performance of the product. A strong grasp of the theoretical and mathematical formulas provides an ability to evaluate what is possible and what is not. Abdicating these imperatives to the CAD tools sometimes leads to missed opportunities and erroneous conclusions.
At Syprosoft, systems engineering is taken very seriously. It is the core activity of the "Analyze" sprint at the start of the Analyze-Design-Build-Evaluate sprints of the ●●●RAPID® Process. It is the reason founder Dipu Ghosh named the company Syprosoft. The name is an amalgamation of the three words Systems-products-software.
Dipu Ghosh, President and Chief Engineer
Another aspect of Systems Engineering is project risk management. Our motto is "We Do What We Promise". How do we accomplish that when so many of our competitors fail?
Part of the answer is our risk averse ●●●RAPID® development process which segments a new product development into three phases - Engineering Unit, Demo Unit and Production Unit. The other part is our data-driven methodology for estimating project costs. There are many ways of estimating the likely cost of a project. Most of these methods involve a decomposition of the project into smaller elements that can be more easily estimated. A common technique is process decomposition. Another technique is the work breakdown structure. Furthermore, it is important to use project risk assessment to quantify inherent risks.
At Syprosoft a combination of these techniques is used for preparing SyproPLAN™ cost estimates. These are calibrated using actual data on projects completed in the past. This technique provides an effort probability distribution that is useful for budgeting. At the idea stage, the distribution may be quite wide. Once the ●●●RAPID® Engineering Unit is completed, the distribution gets much narrower. An example SyproPLAN™ is illustrated below.
Due to our refined ●●●RAPID® development process and our SyproPLAN™ risk management methodology, we are able to offer our clients transparent pricing with choice of fixed price, cost plus, and hourly rate engagements.