A Case Study on Requirements Gathering Process Using Text Mining to Facilitate DX Strategy Formulation

This paper is a study on an industrial engineering approach for the formulation of digital transformation (DX) strategies in the manufacturing industry. When a company is working on the formulation of a DX strategy, it is not uncommon for the stakeholders in the relevant departments to have different opinions and conflict with each other. Therefore, companies invite outside specialized consultants as facilitators and organize workshops with stakeholders to try to compile fair and objective DX requirements. However, not all of the stakeholders who participated in the workshop are satisfied with the results compiled by the consultant. In this paper, we propose to incorporate an augmented digital process of text mining for the content of stakeholders' requirements into the conventional real in-person discussion process of organizing requirements. To evaluate the usefulness of this proposal, we conducted an industrial experiment analyzing stakeholders’ opinions collected during a workshop at an industrial company. In other words, we evaluated whether or not it is possible to discover new insights and potential requirements that the consultant was not aware of. As a result of this experiment, we were able to confirm the possibility of revealing stakeholder opinions that were overlooked by the consultant during the workshop at the time, doing so by applying the proposed approach. From this, we concluded that incorporating text mining into the organization of stakeholder requirements would be effective in the requirements gathering process of DX strategy development.