Specification of a product is the description of the product upon which its development is based. However at present, every product is specified differently and to different levels of abstraction. In industry, acquisition of major systems follows a detailed process that usually commences with initial identification of the need for the system. This continues through the various stages of system design, system build, system validation, commissioning, testing and finally release to the end user. For complex systems incorporating unique designs, new technologies and extensive engineering integration, the acquisition process incorporates numerous activities and may take years to complete. Systems possessing all of these characteristics must be specified in such a way as to totally minimise areas of ambiguity which could affect final design effectiveness and in some cases render the design as useless. As a result of this the specification documents run into several volumes. For acquisition of lesser systems, in many cases the conceptual design and specifications for procurement are developed to very tight schedules. This originates different types of problems as time factors restrict concise design detail, and the opportunity to explore diverse alternatives. Therefore structuring of the 'Specification' is an important area of research. Mature projects using computer-based software have been developed to provide a generic framework, for 'writing specifications for pharmaceutical equipment. 'Specification Developer' as the software is known, has been developed in three stages to reach its present β status. These are: (i) survey of the related work and identification of the constituent elements, (ii) development of the methodology and the software to work in a PC environment, and (iii) testing the methodology with an existing project case study. Several live industrial case studies have been carried out utilising 'Specification Developer' software to construct specifications for a range of hightech pharmaceutical equipment. This paper describes the software structure.
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