A Design Specification Chain: A Concept for Improving Revision Management and Change Tracking

The world of engineering is increasingly global, fast-paced and complex. Businesses are attempting to work smoothly across borders and continents while designing more and more elaborate products. This development puts focus on the need to have relevant documentation readily available anywhere in the world. For many project-based businesses, this translates into an abundance of engineering design specifications done for each project and often in several revisions as the projects are detailed. The engineering design specifications exist to properly convey information and requirements between business units or stakeholders. Their purpose is to ensure that everyone agrees on the task at hand and the intended solution. They are the recipes for the solution and subsequent design tasks, guiding development towards the best solution and avoiding changes and re-work (Hvam et al., 2008; Simpson, 2010). As product related businesses include many expert knowledge areas and function-specific work groups, design specifications are often tailored to individual aspects of the product. Process specifications are done for the process engineering, physical specifications are done for the drawers and electrical specifications are done for the electrical department to design a fitting control solution. This results in a multitude of domain-specific design specifications throughout the organization. An abundance of design specifications are done for a single product, often scattered across many different locations and in several analog and digital formats. These are all sources of information about a given product. If the revisions of the specifications are counted as well, the amount of information sources multiply. Collecting project information is important for conducting project analyses and tracking of changes that are carried out throughout project execution. Businesses often employ a suite of management systems to cope with the need for collecting information and managing changes to that information (Bruun et al., 2015; Hameri & Nikkola, 1995; Lämmer & Theiss, 2015; Muli & Allen, 2013; Siddiqui et al., 2004). These systems are focused on project documentation and structured storage of files for specific purposes e.g. CAD files or technical drawings. The structured storage of project documentation ensures that it is readily available for project stakeholders. However, it does not ensure that project information is readily available for analyses such as portfolio management analyses, trend analyses and business intelligence inquiry, resulting in data and information that is notoriously difficult to gather (Bohm et al., 2011; Brunoe & Nielsen, 2012; Duchi et al., 2014; Foehr et al., 2015; Hvam et al., 2006; Robertson & Ulrich, 1998). These analyses often require access to project data – typically included in specifications. Product categories, sizes, types, functionalities, key performance indicators, etc., which are often defined before the actual solution is created. The primary use of this data is to determine the design the product without prioritizing the implications of the data format and structure on future data management and analyses. There is a need to structure engineering design specification information in a system that allows proper storage and use, subsequent analyses and project continuity. To meet this need, this paper proposes a concept for merging domain-specific product specifications into a combined chain of information in order to support the structured storage of specification information and the accessibility to fundamental project data. This chain serves as the single source of specification information for the project stakeholders, while simultaneously tracking changes and supplying data for subsequent portfolio analyses. The chain also allows product development projects to re-use previous project structures and data.