Requirements Elicitation for a Flexible, Digital, and Methodological Manufacturing Change Management based on a Literature Review and Expert Interviews

In today's manufacturing industry, companies operate in a complex and rapidly changing environment. This environment results in a high number and variety of Manufacturing Changes (MCs). To ensure long-term competitiveness, companies must respond quickly and effectively to various types of MCs. Although most companies have a Manufacturing Change Management (MCM) with an established process for managing MCs, the process often lacks the flexibility to handle the wide variety of MCs efficiently. Furthermore, MCM processes have a deficit in digital and methodological support, reducing the process's effectiveness. This contribution describes a requirements engineering (RE) approach applied to elicit the requirements for a flexible, digital, and methodological MCM. For this, a comprehensive literature review and semi-structured expert interviews were conducted. A total of 18 experts from eight different industries participated in the interviews. After introducing the necessary theoretical foundations and the current state of research in the MCM literature, the RE process is described in detail. The requirements are derived separately from the literature and the expert interviews and are then consolidated. The result is a catalog of requirements for a methodology for a flexible, digital, and methodological MCM. The paper concludes with an outlook on future research perspectives based on the identified requirements.