Requirements Handling in Multidisciplinary Product Development - A Company Study

When developing new products there are a multitude of requirements from different domains to consider making it a multidisciplinary activity. It involves stakeholders from the company and from the broader society. Requirements come from for example the customers, the production facility, suppliers, and governmental agencies placing safety and environmental regulations on the product. To manage all these heterogeneous requirements, a need of formalization and support emerges. The requirements can be managed using IT support. This functionality is often provided in contemporary PLM-systems. In this paper, it is investigated how a large industrial company with in-house design and manufacturing of consumer products formalize the requirements and handles them through the product development stages. The study involves corporate documents and interviewing staff from several departments of the company. Results show that while some aspects such as compliance with health and safety regulations are well supported, others are being addressed differently in each project with little formalization and IT support. This increases the risk of extra iterations in the development process. The paper discusses how to mitigate those risks and highlights some areas of possible improvement of the practices and IT support in product- as well as in production development.