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 Just as a builder needs a set of blueprints to determine how to construct
a home, engineers need guidelines to determine how to design and build a product.
Product Requirements serve as the blueprints for product development, representing
customer needs, market needs, industry regulations/guidelines, quality standards,
etc. To achieve these product goals, it’s essential for a product development
organization to effectively communicate requirements to all downstream decision-makers,
including engineers, so you can understand and keep up with product requirements.
So the question for you, is: How do you keep up with requirements?
Looking at the typical product lifecycle with each part of the organization
represented, we see that marketing learns what the customer wants and creates
feature specs that accurately describe those wants. These are typically "thrown
over the wall" to design, where you continue to translate those wants
into designs that can be thrown over to the manufacturing organization and
so on. Through this process, it’s easy for you to lose sight of the
product requirements as they are lost in formal design documentation (that
you don’t trust to be up-to-date) or in separate databases (that are
isolated from the development process). The result is that the requirements
lose their influence over the product decisions you make – and ultimately,
the product that’s being developed. Based on the method of requirements
tracing you use, you increase the likelihood of a “runaway project” – in
other words, a product that fails to meet time/cost/quality targets.
When requirements are disconnected from the lifecycle process, you often
need to make judgement calls based on your interpretation of the customer
wants. This series of deviations from the original product intent often results
in a product that misses the mark.
With Teamcenter’s Requirements Management capability, UGS integrates
requirements management within the Teamcenter Engineering or Teamcenter Enterprise
data management environment so you can see the relationships of requirements
to the decisions you make, and your designs stay aligned with requirements
along each step of the process. The result is a consistent view of customer
wants across the entire organization -- giving you a better chance of delivering
what the customer really wants.
The Teamcenter portfolio allows the entire organization to see how the customer’s
requirements relate to all parts of the development process. Teamcenter offers
the following advantages to help you deliver products that meet or exceed
customer expectations:
? Complete requirements traceability to original sources vs. disconnected,
isolated requirements document
? Easy access via web browser vs. proprietary application with user restrictions
? Familiar Microsoft Windows desktop interface vs. learning curve of proprietary
application
? Connected requirements to lifecycle processes vs. standalone document/database
with limited visibility by downstream decision-makers
? Automatic generation of requirements documentation vs. time wasted creating
reports, documents
Requirements not only need to be defined, they need to be delivered to everyone.
With Teamcenter, requirements can be quickly and cost-effectively integrated
with your engineering data management solution. Ask your UGS account representative
how Teamcenter’s Requirements Management blueprint can help your products
hit the mark.
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