How to Get Started – Overview

Any company wishing to adopt a Model Based Enterprise (MBE) must decide first why they want to do it. Is it to save money and streamline their processes? Is it to be more competitive in their chosen market? Is it a contractual obligation? The answers to these questions are very important because it allows you to begin to define a business case to support your implementation of MBE. This business case then becomes the foundation for all of your decisions.

Once you have defined your business case the next question you should ask is where do I go from here? But, a more appropriate question is where do I need to be? The reason for this is that each company must find the best set of capabilities that match their business case. Due to the immense scope of MBE no one can hope to implement all of its capabilities initially. A better approach is to look at your business needs and implement only the parts that will make the most difference to your bottom line. Then begin to road map where you see your needs evolving to in the future.

To aid in this the Army Mantech MBE team has developed a detailed MBE Capability Index. This index provides a detailed set of criteria to define MBE Capability Levels that can be used to roadmap an implementation. Each level describes a level of capability not maturity. That is to say the levels are focused on defining a set of capabilities for a specific goal. That goal is a business model centered on a set of processes. These levels are outlined below:

Each of these levels has a great deal of detail going into their definition. The links in this section will go into more detail on each of these to help to begin your journey.

(Please Note that the index is still under development and will evolve in the near future. The site will be updated as quickly as possible)

For example, company A has a contractual obligation to use MBE for a single project and does not know if there will be follow on business for this contract or not. So it would make since that the company level two or three capability and gather metrics on well it went. Once the project is completed they can look at the metrics and decide if they need to move up to level three or four across their organization or not. Also, not all parts of the organization needs to be at the same level. You can phase the implementation however it best fits your business plan. The key is to have a roadmap of where you want to go and then plan how to get there.