Abstract
Keywords - Specification, Design requirements, Product development, Supply chain
Abstract - In todays global climate, automotive companies are facing increased pressure to satisfy market demands with decreasing resources. One avenue for gaining significant competitive advantage, in such a competitive arena, is through extensive collaboration through the supply chain. This offers automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) great possibilities for gaining access to specialist knowledge and capabilities, to spread and share costs and risks, and to better exploit the expertise of their suppliers. To fully realise these opportunities the industry is widely investing in digital product development technologies to reduce both time and cost. However, one topic that has received only modest attention is the specification management process whereby the OEM and their suppliers create and maintain agreement of the design requirements of contracted out system modules. The evolution of a product specification often involves numerous time consuming interactions through the supply chain. It is necessary to better manage these interactions and the associated product requirements information in order to ensure transparency and communication such that engineers are continually updated and informed. A discussion of the problems and issues associated with current specification activities will be presented. To overcome these problems an electronic tool is being developed to reduce the lead-time of generating and disseminating product requirements through the supply chain. The functionalities that will address the highlighted issues will be described. These include: a central requirements repository, ontological structuring of the requirements, multi-user views for different specification perspectives, workflow routines for the specification activities and impact analysis to analyse and evaluate specification changes.