Support for collaborative development of a customer solution in railway transport

Current economical context and industrialization accelerate product development which becomes more and more complex, in particular for complex systems such as railway systems. Consequently, project organization has also an increasing complexity which is reflected in the number of collaborators grouped into teams, in the heterogeneity of the competences and skills as well as the distribution of these teams in different places around the world. It is also the case of developing a customer solution in railways transport which is made possible due to a tight collaboration between the stakeholders in order to accomplish critical activities such as: the understanding of the customer´s real needs and the design of railway systems. Furthermore, diversity in customer background adds further complexity to this process. Therefore, there is a need to find improved ways of supporting activities during customer solution development. A study carried out in the company A revealed there was a need to support customer solution development during Tendering (an early phase of product development). In this context, our goal is to build a dedicated workspace to support collaboration and re-use of past individual and collective knowledge. The paper presents a model and a first implementation of the workspace.