Benefits of Using Requirements Management Tools on a Digitized API 17O Document

Currently oil and gas companies are spending billions of dollars on digitalization efforts. One important aspect of a project that needs to be digitized are requirements. Most oil and gas companies receive project documentation and requirements as PDF files. Receiving PDF documents make it very difficult for companies to manipulate the content to identify which parts of the document are requirements and which parts are just background information. In addition, documents that contain requirements have poorly written requirements that are ambiguous, and can have many interpretations, making it difficult to show compliance. To solve the issues caused by poorly written requirements and receiving PDF files instead of receiving requirements in a more usable format, the solution is to rewrite the requirements and use a requirements management (RM) tool to put the requirements in a database. The American Petroleum Institute (API) 17O 2nd Edition document and a representative list of High Integrity Pressure Protection System (HIPPS) product requirements are used to show the benefits of using a requirements management tool. This paper will describe the prerequisites prior to selecting an RM tool, show how using a requirements quality analyzer tool can aid in preparing requirements to be imported into an RM tool, demonstrate the main benefits of using an RM tool in a project context, and discuss lessons learned from adding an RM tool to a document-based project.