The Requirements Engineering Gap in the OEM- Supplier Relationship

The OEM’s requirements engineering and management process is affected by many residual encumbrances and future constraints. The encumbrances’ origin comes from the OEM’s strong dependency on suppliers’ software development knowledge and support. In contrast, future constraints are dealing with the assembling of software engineering knowledge, especially requirements engineering, as OEM’s core ability. On this account reducing the OEM’s knowledge gap demands tailored engineering processes. The tailoring should take account for different kind of process knowledge, distributed development environment, changing project responsibilities, available but unstructured knowledge bases and different educational members’ background. This report examines main challenges in OEM’s development process to overcome the past OEM-Supplier relationship achieving common development in partnership. For clarification, three process flows are presented showing in some kind the historical evolution of the OEM-Supplier relationship. Based on the presented vital process constraints requirement methods, tools and project management guidelines are derived.