Towards a product line approach for office devices: facilitating customization of office devices at Ricoh Co. Ltd

Like in many other domains, customization is one of the major challenges for providers of office devices like Ricoh Co. Ltd. The specific challenge is the integration of office devices with the workflows and existing office infrastructures of customers. Hence, an approach to support customization of office devices has been developed by Ricoh and Fraunhofer IESE. The approach builds upon product line engineering and focuses on improving application engineering to support customization based on the workflows and office infrastructures of specific customers. The key ideas of the approach are flexibility concepts on architecture level that support recurring types of customizations and a requirements engineering process that is driven by the workflows of individual customers. In this paper, the approach developed in cooperation with Ricoh is presented. A case study illustrates the applicability of the concepts and the overall approach.