Transdisciplinary Engineering Design Process

5Design for Manufacture

Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.

Vince Lombardi

5.1 Introduction

Design for manufacture (DFM) and design for assembly (DFA) are the concepts that have grown out of the need for the United States industry to compete on an international scale, and to minimize the time-to-market for developing new products and introducing them in the marketplace. Design for manufacture was developed by Motorola as a means of reducing product cost and development time. It may require additional effort during early product development since approximately 70–80 percent of the manufacturing cost of a product is determined by design decisions, while production decisions account for only 20 percent. Design for manufacture is obviously worthy of serious consideration.

This method emphasizes the proactive design of products to optimize manufacturing so that fabrication time is minimized, and assembly of the product is simplified, thus ensuring the highest quality and reliability, with minimum cost. This can be accomplished by:

• selecting manufacturing processes and materials adaptable to production methods and supply chain variability as early as in the concept phase;
• avoiding unnecessary design features that require extra processing effort and complex tooling;
• organizing transdisciplinary teams that design the product and develop the manufacturing process concurrently – a process referred to as concurrent or simultaneous engineering. ...