EPIC framework for enterprise processes integrative collaboration

Enterprise System Engineering (ESE), an emerging practice arising in the last decades, aims to improve enterprise operational processes. Its main goal is to enable better collaboration between humans, operational processes, and technical subsystems, by using system engineering methods. However, this is challenging due to the enterprise's unique property as a system of unsynchronized arrays of systems. This property might lead to severe consequences, such as cross-enterprise failures, lack of decision-support information for cross-enterprise decisions, long delays in integration tests, and unexpected emergent behavior. Existing approaches such as ESE frameworks and Systems of Systems (SOS) engineering methods do not fully address this property. This paper presents a new ESE framework named EPIC (Enterprise Processes Integrative Collaboration), that enables better coordination between unsynchronized arrays of systems within the enterprise and even further across several enterprises. This coordination contributes to cross-enterprise operational processes effectiveness. The paper summarizes the results of two successful large-scale implementations of EPIC in the aerospace and transportation disciplines. Results analysis of processes performance and effectiveness, confirm that EPIC leads to improvement in enterprise operational processes. Similarly, we contend that EPIC may be applicable in other disciplines in order to obtain better enterprises by improving cross-enterprise operational processes collaboration.