This section discusses the Engineering Intent methodology for Project development. This methodology has evolved over several decades, and we feel that it provides best practices for the development of knowledge-based engineering systems. We couch our discussion as a system for sales engineering automation for an end-user that Designs, manufactures, and sells products, particularly engineer-to-order products, the most common type of consulting that benefits most from knowledge-based engineering systems.
Although it is certainly possible with kBridge to follow an ad hoc methodology and simply ‘explore’, for more serious and larger applications, we highly recommend a more formal methodology. We will briefly discuss our principal methodology here and some of its benefits. However, there are a lot of other references regarding the traditional waterfall approach as well as Agile methodologies. Detailed presentation of these is beyond the scope of this overview.
The process includes a discovery, a proof-of-concept, a Project specification, and an implementation.
We review each below, with the goal of articulating a methodology for efficient inclusion of everything your end-user(s) will need. In particular, our recommendations will take into account the relative complexity of products; the nature of product variations, from simple configured-to-order to full engineer-to-order; the integration requirements; the user interface requirements – especially related to CAD; and the degree and type of expected participation from the enterprise business groups that will benefit from the resulting system.
