Process-driven product development - Managing manufacturing requirements

This paper focus on the management of manufacturing requirements and more specifically how requirements can be structured in a requirements engineering tool. The different types of requirement structures play an important role in concurrent development, where involved actors (e.g. design and manufacturing engineers) need to view requirements from different perspectives. The general aim with this paper is to narrow the gap between the product and process domain, resulting in better decisions and requirements fulfilment. The study includes descriptive elements on how manufacturing requirements are managed. Furthermore, prescriptively the study demonstrates that manufacturing requirements could be structured not only to the product domain (e.g. functional or physical structures), but also according to the manufacturing domain (e.g. process or resource structures). The different structures and their applicable manufacturing requirements have been implemented in a commercial requirements engineering tool. These, have in turn been reviewed by experienced manufacturing and design engineers at a Swedish car manufacturer during a focus group session. To exemplify the approach, information from the development of a passenger car cockpit is used.