AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--BigLever Software, the leading provider of systems and software product line engineering (PLE) solutions, today announced that its CEO and founder, Dr. Charles Krueger, participated in a recent “think tank” gathering during the prestigious Dagstuhl Program, the premier venue for the world’s foremost scientists, researchers, practitioners, and thought leaders in computer science. At the event, Krueger spotlighted an emerging trend that is enabling innovative enterprises to create highly efficient product line operations – the convergence of Product Line Engineering and Operations (PLE&O).
Krueger was among a select group of engineering pioneers invited to participate in Dagstuhl’s Unifying Product and Software Configuration seminar. “My participation in this event underscores the key role that product line engineering plays in enabling new levels of integration and interoperability across all aspects of creating, delivering, and evolving a product line,” said Krueger. “The industry is undergoing a transformative shift as the benefits of PLE are being extended beyond engineering, into the larger enterprise, including operations.”
According to Krueger, “By aligning engineering with business operations, organizations are able to break down silos, achieve major reductions in complexity, and more effectively manage product variation – from product line portfolio planning to engineering, manufacturing, sales, and maintenance. The result is that organizations can achieve whole factor improvements in efficiency, time-to-market, product line scalability and quality.”
The new PLE&O trend, which will also be the subject of Krueger’s presentations at several upcoming events including the Smart Automotive Variantcon conference, is taking hold in several industry sectors such as automotive and aerospace & defense (A&D). Three key factors are propelling its growth:
- Taming product complexity. Companies are under intense pressure to create an ever-expanding array of increasingly complex products, and bring them to market as efficiently and quickly as possible. By transitioning from traditional product-centric engineering approaches to PLE, engineering organizations have achieved order-of-magnitude gains in complexity reduction and product line scalability. The operations side of the business faces similar complexity management issues. With the emergence of PLE&O, organizations can now apply PLE methods, tools and practices to dramatically reduce complexity, and streamline and simplify the operational aspects of creating and delivering a product line.
- Managing product diversity. PLE&O is particularly applicable in industries where organizations must manage high levels of feature diversity, such as: manufacturing and supply chains in automotive, certification and compliance documentation in A&D, web system deployments in e-commerce and sales automation for complex configurable products. PLE&O addresses these challenges by enabling interoperability and alignment among product marketing, portfolio planning, engineering, supply chain, manufacturing, sales, service and maintenance.
- Creating a “single source of truth.” With traditional product-centric approaches, the various parts of an organization must invent their own solutions for managing product line variation. With PLE approaches, companies can establish a “single source of feature truth” that provides a unified view into product feature variations – eliminating the need for multiple, differing feature management mechanisms across all the different silos of the organization. Establishing this single source of feature truth is the critical capability that PLE provides, which is enabling the convergence of product line engineering and product line operations.
About the Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center and Dagstuhl Program
The
Schloss
Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics, located in Wadern,
Saarland, Germany, is the premier venue for world-class scientists,
researchers and practitioners to exchange knowledge and discuss the
latest innovations, research findings and cutting-edge topics. The
Center promotes fundamental and applied research, new fields of
application, continuing and advanced education and professional
development, and the transfer of knowledge between those involved in the
research side and the application side of computer science. Dagstuhl
programs use a unique concept to promote personal interaction and
discussion of ideas, sketches and open problems, rather than the
presentation of established results.
About BigLever Software
BigLever
Software, Inc., the leading provider of systems and software product
line engineering solutions and services, dramatically simplifies the
creation, evolution, maintenance and delivery of a product line – a
portfolio of similar products or systems with variations in features and
functions. BigLever’s patented Gears solution enables organizations to
reduce development costs and bring new product line features and
products to market faster, enabling businesses to more reliably target
and hit strategic market windows. BigLever is based in Austin, Texas.
For more information, visit www.biglever.com.
BigLever Software is a trademark of BigLever Software, Inc. All other company or product names mentioned herein may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
