Effectiveness of Systems Engineering Techniques on New Product Development: Results from Interview Research at Corning Incorporated

In new product development (NPD) in the commercial(as opposed to military/aerospace) environment, many firms express confidencein the value of applying systems engineering (SE) techniques to the NPDprocess, even though there is little research to date that systematicallyevaluates the benefits of SE in the commercial setting. The goal of this paperis therefore to address this gap in the research by testing for SE impactacross multiple projects, in this case within a single enterprise, namely CorningIncorporated. To achieve this goal, a joint team from the Systems EngineeringDirectorate at Corning Incorporated and the Systems Engineering Program atCornell University conducted interview research to test for systems engineering(SE) effectiveness in product development in a commercial setting. The teamconducted 19 interviews of systems engineers and project managers withinCorning to evaluate the extent to which they used a range of systemsengineering techniques, and the effectiveness of those techniques in improvingproject performance. The results from the interviews showed that for fourselected areas of SE techniques (market, requirements, validation/verification,and trade studies), use of SE could be detected across projects that covered abroad range of Corning’s markets. Furthermore, an association was found betweenSE input and project performance. Of the 19 projects, 3 had superior projectperformance, and of these 2 out of 3 had “above average” scores in terms of theextent of SE use. At the other end of the spectrum, 2 out of 19 projects werejudged to have “struggling” performance, and in both cases project difficultieswere traced back to shortcomings in the use of SE that in turn resulted in lowscores in one of the four SE areas. These findings support industry’s generalintuition that early investment in the systems approach in NPD pays off in termsof better project outcomes. At the end of the paper, content analysis of quotesfrom interviews captures project managers’ perspectives on applying systemsengineering, and the concluding discussion suggests ways the study of SEeffectiveness might be extended to other enterprises.