Effective method for creating engineering checklists

Journal article, 2013

This paper presents the results of an empirical study of a project whose aim was to develop a driveline for commercial vehicle applications containing a totally new mechatronic sub-system with a significant amount of new functions and interfaces. The purpose of the empirical study was to identify areas where explicit knowledge management efforts are needed in the development process of a mechatronic systems integrator. The results show that the management of knowledge related to component/system interfaces is not addressed neither in the state of practice nor the state of the art. Based on these findings, the method of engineering checklists to manage interface related knowledge was found suitable. Methods on how to implement engineering checklists however are largely lacking and the main contribution of this paper is a method dedicated to creating engineering checklists from a knowledge management perspective. The evaluation of the developed method indicates a high level of both usefulness and usability of the method in the processes of the studied company along with potential improvement mainly regarding the instructions for the application of the method.