Global Supply Chain Resilience: Fundamental to the Future of SI

How the Global Shift to Net Zero Targets and Advancing Digitalisation will Apply Stress to Supply Chains providing Systems Integration Resource??

The shift of attention to taking on the big challenges of our time – challenges like climate change and the associated Net Zero shift, creating a hybrid world with enhanced and integration digital infrastructure as the norm, creating a world where sustainability does not stop at the national boundaries of the more developed nations but extends into currently less developed parts of the world – all require a deep and embedded systems approach. A systems approach is needed because these challenges (and all the associated subsidiary challenges) are interlinked. Globalisation has created a world where all the major problems are shared, and where managing one manifestation implicitly affects others: positively or adversely.?

Traditionally, automotive and aerospace have dominated the market in terms of systems engineering resource but if we are to be successful in achieving our goals, systems engineering needs to be adopted by civil engineering, power engineering, transport (as a sector – rail, maritime in addition to automotive and aerospace), industrial / manufacturing to name a few. And this will be needed for more than just engineering purposes – it will be needed throughout the lifecycles of the assets to ensure a robust approach to sustaining the solutions.??

This is the challenge.??

Systems Engineering, and specifically the Systems Integration sub-discipline of it, are scarce resources. The industry has a lot of requirements specialists but as you progress through the V Lifecycle from left to right the number of specialists decreases. With all the demands placed on the field by all the competing projects, there is a risk that the global supply chain of SI resource is not resilient enough to handle it.?

Long-term the only option is organic upskilling – developing internal talent to match the scale and duration of the task; however, in the short term, my gut feel is that we will see a rise in full stack systems engineering consultancies.??

Why? Because it makes sense short-term to outsource critical skills and once you have a reliance on it, it becomes more difficult to bring it back in-house. How? Because once you commit to that model, you can bring the unit price of a systems engineer down very quickly – a dedicated business means dedicated recruitment and graduate and apprentice pipelines, there will always be entry-level positions to fill and it is easier to develop engineers if you have a pipeline and talent pool dedicated to it.?

But the question, is how quickly can this all be achieved? As we have said earlier, with the dearth of systems engineers available and time is takes to train people – will it be responsive enough..?