Within the specialist disciplines, it is standard practice to create project-specific documents by copying parts of previous project documents and manually adapted them.
This process, which can be termed Reusing by copying can nevertheless cause a broad range of problems.
- The engineering process represented here concerns order processing. No coordination or standardization takes place at a cross-project level. Developments that occur within a project are known only to the individual engineer, and are not shared with the company as a whole. This leads to multiple developments, and hence to unnecessarily high costs and a high number of solution variants.
- Errors, too, are copied from project to project when copying. Systematic, cross-project, continuous quality improvement is not possible.
- Due to the lack of standardization and the high number of variants, the commissioning of machines and plants is extremely expensive, because in principle every function has to be tested again and again. After-sales service lacks the standards that enable a service technician to service or repair customized machines and facilities that he didn’t build himself.
The reason why, despite these obvious shortcomings, most companies still apply the ‘reusing by copying’ principle lies in the high level of variance in mechanical and plant engineering and the high number of disciplines involved.