As engineering systems increase in complexity, so too do the management systems required to manage and control the organizations that develop them. Enterprise management systems such as product development processes and command media are often created to help ease these complexities. However, without a means to compare and associate actual work performed to the enterprise management system the opportunity for optimized enterprises is lost. By combining industry standard accounting infrastructure, the enterprise management system du jour and a customized intelligent system to map the two that hope can become reality. (12) Such an intelligent system can take an organization from a state of defined processes to optimized enterprise. Specific benefits include: Clear indicators of organizational adherence to enterprise management systems and how well those systems are performing to their intent; Functional efficiency and performance metrics across enterprises, functional groups, and down to the individual contributor; Better focus on critical path tasks by the individual contributors begin to own their own budgets, schedules and scopes; Mentoring and training opportunities are identified along the enterprise management system allowing for a focused development approach; Individuals can clearly identify their personal association to program schedules and budgets. It is the purpose of this paper to discuss an approach taken to connect enterprise management systems to the actual work performed within engineering enterprises, and the opportunities associated to this approach. Discussions will include the critical design elements, system development, integration with existing infrastructure such as SAP, promotion of healthy user behavior through design requirements, buy-in from management, alignment to management theory, deployment strategies, scalability of metrics and other opportunities that result. It is the intent of these discussions to describe an actual implementation and its benefits, in addition to helping the reader identify opportunities for implementation within their own organizations.
