During the past 20 years, Dana has refined its proven engineering processes to ensure that its products and customer projects exceed the expectations of its customers.

Dana’s defined processes support the planning, implementation, monitoring and control of process across the entire organization. This includes overall responsibility for the work products covering the core activities and not otherwise governed by outside regulations and requirements.

Upfront Planning

Project setup and Systems Engineering are a critical phase of work for rigorous development activities. The formal process used by Dana (which we call our Business Management System) provides guidelines and quality control templates for each stage of project work, and provides the basis for the Project Setup. Requirements elicitation, requirements capture, and requirements review are conducted early in the project, according to guidelines. Proper identification of concise, essential, top-level requirements is a cornerstone of all project work that will follow.

Formal Review Process

Reviews are the backbone of Dana’s approach to ensuring that Dana delivers work products that are as right as possible; as quickly as possible. Given that the earlier a potential problem is found the cheaper it is to fix, extra care is taken in reviews of the higher-level work products which are used as input to the lower-level work products. All project deliverables and work products that are used in the engineering process are reviewed.

Release Management

Dana has a clearly defined process for releasing work products and deliverables to the customer. Release management is a significant step in ensuring that the deliverables have been reviewed with the appropriate rigor and approved before delivery to customer. The release process is part of Dana’s overall configuration management. It includes release planning, build/parts control, and delivery to the customer. This procedure applies to all engineering services work undertaken within Dana.

Traceability

Dana implements bi-directional traceability through all work products from customer requirements and requests down through design, code, and test results. This allows an easy-to-follow link between every step of development thereby identifying gaps, if any, and demonstrating that all requirements have been met. In addition, traceability allows Dana to rapidly conduct change impact analysis at all levels of the development cycle.