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User requirements Another major source of information for the project team will be the current and potential users of engineering information. However, many of these will never have thought about the overall EDM/PDM requirements of the company, so the project team will have to develop specific techniques to find the necessary information. Project team study groups may be set up to interview individual users and groups of users. Some of these will be from individual functions, and some from cross-functional organizational structures such as product teams. In general, users are the best source of information about everyday activities, the information that is used in such activities, and short-term improvements. Users often find it more difficult to address longer-term and cross-functional issues. The project team should encourage users to discuss their problems with data access, use and management, since it is often the users who are the people closest to the problems of inaccurate, erroneous and late data. In some cases, the project team will use a suitably designed questionnaire to gather specific results from users. In other cases, this may not be necessary, but an interview document will need to be produced to encourage individual interviewers to remember to ask the most important questions. Sometimes a top-down hierarchical breakdown of information requirements may be a suitable modeling approach. Most users can understand such models. The amount of detail in the model can be progressively increased until a user feels that all information use and flow is shown on the diagram. Other users can be asked to comment on the model, and models produced by users in neighboring activities can be put together to see how information is transferred. Another approach is to use the entity-relationship model. Again individual users can be helped to produce their 'picture' of the information they use. Once the entities have been identified, the next step will be to identify their attributes. This approach, like all modeling activities, can be very time-consuming if carried out to the finest level of detail. The project team should decide how much time can be spent on modeling, and then define the most important activities to be modeled and the amount of detail that is required. During the early stages, the project team may not need very detailed information. The models developed at this stage can be kept, and then worked on in more detail later in the EDM/PDM implementation process when a solution has been chosen, and detailed logical data base design takes place. Even during the earliest stages, it will be helpful to use computer-based tools to manage the information models. It may also be possible to develop prototypes that users can run in everyday work, thus giving them a better feel for the way EDM/PDM can assist them, and helping them perhaps to identify necessary modifications and improvements. The users should also be encouraged to explain their view of the overall process. The project team will learn how they receive work, how they know when to start working on a project or to change to another project, the organizational hierarchy, the release procedure, and so on. They will see where information is created, how it flows, the way it is used, distributed and stored, and the corresponding management actions. The project team must not restrict itself to understanding the requirements of users in the Engineering Department. The needs of other users, including those in the marketing function and on the shop floor, also have to be addressed. Similarly, the needs of departmental managers are as important to understand as those of users such as part programmers. The project team may detect user concerns about the implementation of EDM/PDM. These can range from fears of loss of status, job satisfaction and job, to worries about retraining, reassignment and re-grading. If such attitudes are prevalent, the project team will need to increase user involvement and improve communications with users. The features required The project team needs to develop a list of features believed necessary for an EDM/PDM solution. Preparation of such a list helps to provoke discussion and to get agreement on the scope of the solution to be proposed. It can also show that the various issues raised have at least been understood and noted, even if they may not be answered in the eventual solution. The project team should indicate if each individual feature is an essential part of the solution, and if not, assign it a relative importance factor. The first list that the project team produces will probably have very many entries. These will have to be examined closely, grouped and checked to ensure that duplicate or conflicting entries are not included. |