Semi-structured expert interview-based requirements elicitation for a digitalized production ramp-up

Abstract

Due to the ever-shortening innovation cycles and the rapid change of customer demands, enterprises introduce new, innovative, and modern products at an increasingly faster frequency and desirably lower costs. The technological change of products and mass customization increase the product complexity. This development requires manufacturing enterprises to perform more frequent production ramp-ups. Many production ramp-up projects miss the time, cost, and quality targets, causing manufacturing enterprises to lose potential profit due to later market introduction. Although digital tools are widely applied during the serial production phase, their potential during production ramp-up is hardly investigated in the scientific literature. Moreover, no guidelines exist on how to use digital tools during the production ramp-up in various industries. To provide data-driven support for the production ramp-up phase, requirements for the functionality of digital tools need to be defined. Henceforth, this paper applies a requirements engineering (RE) approach to elicit the requirements for digital tools to support the production ramp-up phase based on a comprehensive literature review and semi-structured expert interviews. In total, 13 experts from seven different industries participated in the interviews. After introducing the necessary theoretical foundations and the current state of research in ramp-up management literature, the RE process is described in detail. The RE process is based on user stories – an agile development tool – and the ISO 29148, which outlines an international standard for RE processes. The result is a set of requirements for the functionality of digital tools during the production ramp-up phase. Finally, the paper presents an outlook on future research perspectives for applying the elicited requirements in practice.