An engineer receives a terms of reference for the development of a new machine tool and, in the second week of design, runs into a question the document does not answer: what ambient temperature must the equipment withstand while maintaining its stated characteristics? He has to call the customer, wait for a reply, and halt part of the work. Multiply such pauses by a dozen similar gaps, and it becomes clear why a poorly drafted terms of reference for equipment development costs more than the time spent on careful preparation of it.
In this article, we will look at what a terms of reference must contain, how to formulate technical requirements, what initial data must be provided to the developer, and how the terms of reference relate to the subsequent design documentation.
What a Terms of Reference for Equipment Development Should Contain
A terms of reference is a document that records the requirements for the future product and becomes the starting point for all subsequent stages: design, manufacturing, testing, and acceptance. An error or omission in the terms of reference costs more the later it is discovered: at the stage of manufacturing a prototype, correction costs orders of magnitude more than amending a wording at the stage of agreeing the document.
A full-fledged terms of reference for product development usually includes the following sections: the name and purpose of the equipment; the grounds for development (contract, R&D plan, internal memo); technical requirements — performance, dimensions, materials, operating conditions, reliability requirements, safety requirements, scope of delivery, requirements for testing and acceptance; and the procedure for preparing design and operational documentation based on the results of the work.
The difference between a good and a bad terms of reference rarely lies in the absence of entire sections — more often the problem is that the sections are present formally, but the requirements within them are vaguely worded: “the equipment must be reliable” instead of a specific mean time between failures, “compact dimensions” instead of maximum dimensions in millimeters. Such wording leaves the developer room for interpretation, which is almost always interpreted to the customer’s disadvantage.
How to Formulate Technical Requirements
The basis of the terms of reference is the technical requirements section, and it is here that errors affecting the entire subsequent project are most often made. A requirement must be measurable: not “high performance,” but a specific value indicating the units of measurement and the conditions under which it is achieved. A wording that cannot be verified experimentally or by calculation is effectively useless — it gives the developer no guidance and does not allow the customer, at acceptance, to prove that the requirement has not been met.
Let us examine three groups of requirements that most often cause difficulty in formulation.
Performance and Technical Specifications
Performance and the other tactical and technical characteristics are the central part of the technical requirements, because they determine what task the equipment is intended for and by what parameters the result of the development will be evaluated. These include the performance indicator itself (units of output per hour, volume of material processed, speed of an operation), accuracy and tolerances, power consumption, dimensions and weight, and requirements for structural materials.
These requirements should be formulated by specifying a range or limit value, not an abstract guideline: not “sufficient machining accuracy,” but “dimensional deviation of no more than 0.05 mm”; not “compact dimensions,” but “no more than 1200×800×1500 mm.” Where a requirement depends on operating conditions — for example, performance may decrease when working with a denser material — this too should be stated explicitly, so that during testing there is no dispute about the mode in which the indicator is to be verified.
Operating Conditions of the Equipment
The section that most often suffers from insufficient detail is the conditions in which the equipment must maintain its stated characteristics. These include the ambient temperature range, humidity, dust content, vibration and shock loads, characteristics of the power supply, and placement requirements — indoors, on an open site, or as part of a mobile object.
Omitting this section or filling it in a perfunctory way is a frequent cause of conflicts between the customer and the developer after the equipment has already been manufactured: a device designed without regard to actual operating conditions may work flawlessly in a laboratory and fail at the customer’s site because of temperature fluctuations or increased vibration that were not specified in the original terms of reference.
Reliability and Service Life
Reliability requirements translate the abstract wish that “the equipment must be durable” into specific, verifiable indicators: the assigned service life before decommissioning or overhaul, mean time between failures, warranty period of operation, and requirements for maintainability and availability of spare parts.
These indicators are important not only for assessing the quality of the finished product, but also directly influence design decisions as early as the design stage: the developer builds in the choice of materials, the safety margin of components, and the design of quickly wearing parts precisely on the basis of the required service life. If this requirement is not recorded in the terms of reference or is worded vaguely, the developer is forced either to build in an excessive safety margin, increasing the cost of the product, or to rely on his own assumptions, which may not coincide with the customer’s expectations.
What Initial Data Must Be Provided to the Developer
In addition to the technical requirements themselves, the developer needs a set of initial data without which it is impossible to design the equipment correctly, even if the requirements are formulated perfectly. Such data include: the parameters of the raw material or material the equipment will work with; the characteristics of the production premises or site where it will be installed; the requirements of adjacent systems with which the equipment must interact; the current industry standards and regulations with which the product must comply; and safety requirements — protective guards, emergency stops, certification.
The requirement for the scope of delivery deserves separate mention: what exactly must be handed over to the customer together with the equipment — operational documentation, a spare parts kit, special tools, personnel training. The absence of this section in the terms of reference often leads to a dispute at the acceptance stage, when the customer expects to receive a complete set, while the developer expects to deliver only the product itself without accompanying materials.
The last mandatory element is the requirements for testing and acceptance: which parameters are verified and by what method before the equipment is handed over to the customer, and what documents are drawn up on the results — test reports, an acceptance certificate. Without this section, the parties risk diverging in their understanding of what “the equipment is ready” even means.
How to Link the Terms of Reference to the Design Documentation
The terms of reference is not an isolated document, but the first link in a chain that continues with the design documentation, the test program, and, ultimately, the finished equipment. Every requirement recorded in the terms of reference must be traceable to a specific solution in the drawings and to a specific item in the test program that confirms its fulfillment.
In practice, this means that when developing the design documentation the engineer must regularly check against the terms of reference, rather than work from it once at the start of the project. If during design a requirement proves technically infeasible or economically inexpedient, this is recorded officially — through agreed changes to the terms of reference, and not through a tacit departure from the original requirements, which surfaces only at acceptance of the finished product.
A separate rule: the terms of reference for the development of a machine or other complex device consisting of several interrelated components should be detailed so that the requirements for individual subsystems do not contradict one another and do not create conflicts at the assembly stage — for example, when a dimensional requirement for one component makes it physically impossible to meet the maintainability requirement for a neighboring one.
How to Check a Future Design Against Patent Databases with “POSINT”
Even before the technical requirements for developing the terms of reference are finally fixed, it is useful to check whether the intended design coincides with existing and patented solutions. This is especially important if the equipment is being developed not simply for a specific customer task but with a view to patenting or further serial replication — in that case, repeating someone else’s technical solution means a risk of claims from the right holder after the equipment has already been manufactured and put into operation.
The AI engineer “POSINT” makes it possible to perform such a check quickly, at a stage when the solution can still be adjusted without serious costs:
- processes a description of the future equipment in natural language — there is no need to select patent terminology in advance;
- analyzes the global state of the art, checking relevant patents and applications in Russian and foreign databases;
- finds the closest technical analogues and shows how the proposed design differs from them;
- generates a structured report that can be used when agreeing the terms of reference with the customer.
Conduct a patent search with “POSINT” before the terms of reference are approved — it will take hours instead of weeks of manual analysis and will protect the project from design solutions that someone has already patented before you.
Conclusion
A well-drafted terms of reference turns the customer’s expectations into specific and verifiable requirements for the future equipment. The more precisely performance, operating conditions, service life, constraints, initial data, and the testing procedure are defined at the start, the fewer clarifications, rework, and unplanned costs arise during the development of design documentation and the manufacture of the product.
But the completeness of the terms of reference is only part of project preparation. Before the design is approved, it is important to check which similar technical solutions already exist and whether the development repeats known or patented solutions. Such an analysis makes it possible to adjust the concept at a time when changes do not yet require redoing drawings, a prototype, and finished equipment.
Conduct a patent search with “POSINT” before the terms of reference are approved — to make design decisions that take existing developments into account and to avoid spending budget on subsequent rework of the project.