Interview with Sven-Olaf Schulze on SE in Germany

Sven-Olaf Schulze should be a familiar name to anyone in Germany who is involved in systems engineering (SE), as he has been a member of the Gesellschaft für Systems Engineering (GfSE) in 1997 and has been Chairman since 2009.

In addition to his voluntary work at the GfSE, he was a lecturer in systems engineering at the HAW. Today he is a senior expert at UNITY AG.

I conducted this interview on June 1, 2016.

You have been on the GfSE Board since 2003 and Chairman since 2009. How has GfSE changed during this time?

How many hours do you have? But seriously, we still had a few negative offshoots from 2002, because there was the European Conference 2000 in Munich, where we experienced quite a boom. As a reminder, the GfSE was founded in 1997 and organized a European conference a few years later. There was a very committed board, and after the conference we also had a lot of members. But after that there were no more activities from the association. As a result, many members resigned in 2002. In 2003, Dr. Scheithauer and I took over the chairmanship. We then developed it from an association of enthusiasts into an industrial association, especially initially with members from the aerospace industry, but always with the urge to be active across all industries.

Over the years, we have then created appeal through products such as the SE Manual in German, working groups, some of which are benchmarks in the INCOSE-world until certification. As a result, we have been able to generate a lot of added value together with the volunteer members and have a corresponding influx. We are proud that we have the largest cross-industry mix of members in the INCOSE world, which allows them to exchange ideas across the board.

GfSE has the largest cross-sector mix in the INCOSE world

The proportion of members from the aerospace industry has now fallen to below 20% and has been driven by the automotive industry, medical technology and general mechanical engineering in the last few years.

How has the perception of the SE changed in Germany during this time?

There are two aspects to this. In the beginning, we tried to make ourselves known as missionaries in the SE, and that is a very big effort. In the meantime, we have moved away from that and it is primarily about getting involved in standardization and representing the industry. Of course, other standards have supported the attractiveness of SE, keyword 26262 in the automotive sector. In the medical sector, there is also a new standard that creates the need for SE in order to deal with traceability and the safety of medical devices. This has also generated a huge amount of interest. Standardization has sparked interest in a solution, and the solution is SE.

Today, GfSE is active in the areas of norms and standards, as well as (technical) networking.

The other aspect is the economy itself and networking, keyword "autonomous driving", keyword "Industry 4.0", integration of software even in simple products, networking via apps or city infrastructure, and so on. "The world is a village".

What is the status of systems engineer training in Germany, and what is the role of SE-ZERT® in this?

The SE-ZERT® program supports the statutory goal of creating a uniform job description and developing a language in order to adequately promote technology and innovation.

Universities have the task of meeting the demand for generalists as well as specialists in today's world. Of course, we still need specialists very intensively, but we also need this SE concept. We are in an equivalent position to business studies, where people used to say: "How can you pack business and engineering into one degree course? Nobody needs it" - today we are talking about nothing else, and every second student is an industrial engineer. We are now on the same threshold as the industrial engineers were back then. Today, many people ask: "Why do we need systems engineers? I need a specialist."

The Systems Engineer course is at a similar point to the Industrial Engineer course 20 years ago: Back then it was questioned, today industrial engineers are in high demand. I expect a similar development for systems engineers.

Universities are already facing the challenge of not being able to meet the demand for systems engineers. You can already see that with SE-ZERT®. Everyone is asking for systems engineers, but nobody can provide them with the right skills today. This is where universities are called upon to provide adequate training. At the moment, these are often Master's degree courses with a Bachelor's degree as a subject-specific basis. I believe this is the future: you can use it to manage teams in smaller projects as a component manager and slowly develop into overall system responsibility in your professional life.

In the USA, it is not uncommon to start your career with a Bachelor's degree and then go on to study for a Master's degree later.

It's actually only a phenomenon in Germany that this doesn't happen. However, if you go to France or other European countries, it is common for Bachelor's graduates to go into industry and get a decent job there. At Airbus in France, for example, there are many Bachelor's graduates who are then adequately trained and further educated within the company and then perhaps go on to do a Master's at some point.

How will systems engineering develop in Germany over the next few years? What are the major trends?

The next important aspects are integration and linking in the sense of tool-based end-to-end development. I deliberately don't say model-based: You can't ignore the fact that there are FEM methods and thermal analyses for the interpretation of the detailed design, or even 3D drawings. However, this also means that the elements that are state of the art today will be combined with systems engineering in order to master the complexity. The future is therefore a mixture of tooling and methods.

In terms of the job description, this will become more and more established and accepted. The use of the toolbox will also become established among pure developers and engineers, because everyone must have the competence to understand an architecture specification somewhere, even if they do not have overall responsibility as a systems engineer.

The "toolbox" in systems engineering will become more and more established and we must ensure that we create a uniform language and a uniform understanding here.

What I think is a shame is that the big tool manufacturers are buying up the small, innovative companies and integrating them into their "molloch". A few years ago, we had many innovative, small MBSE companies that have now been merged under the umbrella of IBM, PTC, etc. There are only a few independent companies that are trying to fight this tooth and nail. NoMagic from Lithuania is a good example of this for me. It is one of the few that has remained agile and is still responsive to the customer. I miss the competition a bit.

Do you have any final words?

We have now dissolved our "Cooperation" division in the Advisory Board and are strategically positioning ourselves more towards small and medium-sized companies, for example with the ISO 29110. We want to focus clearly on this group.