Free tool
5W2H requirements builder
Answer 36 questions about who, what, where, when, why, how and how much. Get a shortlist of technologies, a plan and a brief you can hand to a vendor, saved behind a link you can share.
Write your requirements
Fills in the first question under each heading and the shortlist answers, so you can see how a finished one reads. Switch examples any time; anything you've typed yourself is kept.
Saved on this device only.
Who
The people who capture, own and act on the data.
What
The things you track and what you need to know about each.
Where
The places and handoffs where tracking has to happen.
When
How quickly data has to move, and when someone needs it.
Why
The reason this is worth doing now.
How
How the work gets done on the floor and in the systems.
How much
Volume, budget and time.
A few questions to shortlist technology
Your answers above are for people. These are for the sums.
The plan
What to do with the answers. Tick things off as they happen.
Keep it and share it
Save it and you get a link. Anyone who has the link can open and edit this, so send it to the people who should. We delete a workspace that goes a year without a change, and we don't ask who you are. Please don't put anything confidential in it.
Your brief
What you've answered so far, as a document you can paste into an email or hand to a vendor.
Read it here
How it works
What it’s for
Most traceability projects that go wrong went wrong before anyone bought anything. Someone chose RFID where QR would have done, or built a system the operators then worked around. 5W2H is a way of forcing the awkward questions early: who, what, where, when, why, how and how much. It came out of Japanese quality management and Toyota’s production system, and it’s still the quickest way to find out your stakeholders disagree.
Take it into a workshop with operations, IT, finance and quality in the room. About two hours is enough. Fill it in together, argue about the answers that don’t match, and give each one a priority.
Saving it and sharing it
There are no accounts. Until you press Save and get a link, your answers stay in this browser and nowhere else. After that, they’re stored on our server behind a long random link. Anyone who has that link can open and edit the workspace, so send it to the people who should. There’s also a read-only link, for showing the result to people who shouldn’t change it.
The link sits after the # in the address, which your browser never sends to a server, so it doesn’t appear in our logs. If you’d like to be sure you can find it again, we’ll email it to you.
We delete a workspace that has gone a year without a change. Treat it as a notebook, not an archive, and keep anything confidential out of it.
The shortlist
The six questions under the shortlist heading are the ones that decide most technology choices: what you’re identifying, how many reads a day, whether you need to read many at once, whether you need to know where things are all the time, what a tag can cost, and whether there’s metal or liquid nearby. The answers score each technology and the best three come back with the reasons.
It’s a starting point for the conversation with a vendor, not a recommendation. Most sites end up with two technologies, because a carton and a forklift are different problems.
If RFID comes out near the top, the RFID range calculator will tell you whether a particular tag and reader will do the distance.
The spreadsheet
If you’d rather work offline, the same questions and the three worked examples are in the Excel template. The longer explanation of the method is in the 5W2H guide.