Creating a .sysprep image

What you are describing appears to be more of a backup solution than a deployment solution. There are three ways I see to accomplish what you want to do:
1. A basic image-based backup solution such as Windows System Image Backup.
2. An image captured after having run Sysprep to generalize the image.
3. A deployment solution to manage a new image and/or application installations, etc.

The first solution is by far the simplest, which is to just create a backup image of your current system and to restore it to a new system in the case of system failure or replacement. The image will not be generalized, but if you have any issues restoring it to a new system you can restore it to a virtual machine and remove any conflicting drivers through manual uninstallation. This also allows you to avoid Sysprep generalization, which can conflict with security software.

The second solution is essentially what you outlined that you do at work. You would generalize the system with Sysprep and shut it down, then boot to an imaging solution and capture an image. This imaging solution could be DISM on WinPE, MDT boot media, Acronis, or any other imaging solution. One disadvantage to doing this solution is that you will have to generalize your existing environment on your system, so after capturing the image you would boot to an environment stripped of activation information, drivers, etc.

The third solution is to create a new image from a system that is based on a minimalistic environment (usually a virtual machine). In this image you could install your applications, or let them be managed by a deployment solution like the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT). This would mean that you would not need to run Sysprep on your existing environment, only on a virtual machine. It would also ensure that the minimal driver configuration is present in the image to minimize conflict. With MDT you can even chose to add your apps and drivers to MDT rather than into the reference image and have them be installed automatically. If you’re interested in MDT and what it can do, either for you or for your work, you should check out the Windows 8.1 Deployment Jump Start here. The deployment technologies and concepts discussed also apply to Windows 7.