BigLever CEO Leads INCOSE Initiative to Establish ISO Standards for Feature-Based Product Line Engineering

AUSTIN, TX--(Marketwired - June 05, 2017) - BigLever Software, the long-standing leader in the Product Line Engineering (PLE) field, today announced that the company's CEO, Dr. Charles Krueger, was selected by the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) to lead the development of new ISO standards for Feature-based PLE. Krueger will play an instrumental role in bringing together experts from across the globe to develop a disciplined, structured set of standards that can be applied to help engineering organizations implement the most efficient, effective and proven modern PLE approaches.

"Feature-based PLE is emerging as one of the foremost areas of innovation within the systems engineering field today," said Krueger. "These new ISO standards will clearly define the modern PLE approaches that are enabling the industry's most notable PLE success stories. Feature-based PLE provides a fully unified, automated approach across engineering and operations disciplines, tools and processes -- allowing organizations to create and bring more product innovations to market faster, more efficiently, and more competitively."

INCOSE is a not-for-profit organization that develops and promotes the interdisciplinary principles and practices that advance systems engineering and enable successful systems implementations. Over the past few years, INCOSE's leadership has recognized the growing importance of PLE in the systems engineering arena. This ISO standards development initiative further underscores the significance of Feature-based PLE as a key enabler for leading-edge systems engineering practices.

"Product Line Engineering has become a critical technology that will have broad impact across the systems engineering field," said Dr. Gina Guillaume-Joseph, assistant director, Standards Initiatives, INCOSE. "It is important to the community that we facilitate awareness and understanding of the latest PLE approaches and proven best practices. We are excited to have industry leader and PLE pioneer Dr. Krueger leading our effort to establish the new Feature-based PLE standards, as well as helping to promote their widespread adoption."

As market demand for product sophistication and diversity continues to grow, companies face new levels of systems engineering complexity. It is not unusual for engineering teams to spend as much as two-thirds of their time dealing with the mundane tasks of managing the mounting complexity of product variation. PLE addresses product complexity by dramatically simplifying the creation, delivery, maintenance, and evolution of a product line portfolio. Feature-based PLE enables a unified approach across the full lifecycle, from portfolio planning to multi-discipline asset engineering, product marketing, manufacturing, sales, and service. By providing a "single source of feature truth," modern PLE enables a holistic view into the feature variations for a product family, eliminating the need for different variant management mechanisms across the organization.

The new PLE standards will delineate the specialization of state-of-the-art PLE approaches where featured-based automation is used to remove the complexities that existed with early-generation PLE techniques. These techniques, such as asset cloning, branching and merging, created barriers to PLE adoption in the past.

About the INCOSE Standards Initiatives
The INCOSE Standards Initiatives is a forum where leading industry experts come together to develop voluntary, consensus-based, market relevant International Standards that support innovation and provide solutions to global challenges. INCOSE liaises with existing standards developing organizations to contribute to the development of standards and to plan for new work items related to systems engineering. The Standards Initiatives has been participating in a broad range of standards related specifically to advancing the state and practice of systems engineering and includes work in SC7, SC27, and Object Management Group (OMG).

About Dr. Charles Krueger
With more than 30 years of experience in systems and software engineering practice, Krueger is the founder of BigLever Software, a premier speaker, widely published author, and acknowledged thought leader in the PLE field. He has proven expertise in leading commercial product line development teams, and helping some of the world's largest forward-thinking organizations establish leading-edge PLE practices across a spectrum of industries, including automotive, aerospace, defense, aviation, alternative energy, e-commerce, and computer systems.

About BigLever Software
BigLever Software is the long-standing leader in the Product Line Engineering field. BigLever's holistic onePLE solution delivers the leading-edge technology, proven methodology, business strategy and organizational change expertise needed to efficiently transition to and operate a game-changing PLE practice. The company's state-of-the-art PLE methods and tools provide one unified, automated approach for feature-based variant management. This approach extends across the full lifecycle, including engineering and operations disciplines; software, electrical, and mechanical domains; and tool ecosystem. Some of the world's largest forward-thinking organizations across a spectrum of industries are leveraging BigLever's PLE solution to engineer their competitive advantage through order-of-magnitude improvements in productivity, time-to-market, portfolio scalability, and product quality. BigLever is based in Austin, Texas. For more information, visit www.biglever.com.

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