Transcript for EO403 - DfMA Benefits, Issues and Approaches.PDF
Transcript
Graduate Apprenticeship - Engineering Design and Manufacture Class: EO403 - Design for X DfMA Benefits, Issues and Approaches In this video, we'll be covering design for manufacture and assembly. We'll cover, what is design for for manufacture and assembly known as DFMA? Why is there a need for DFMA...
Graduate Apprenticeship - Engineering Design and Manufacture Class: EO403 - Design for X DfMA Benefits, Issues and Approaches In this video, we'll be covering design for manufacture and assembly. We'll cover, what is design for for manufacture and assembly known as DFMA? Why is there a need for DFMA? What are its benefits, what are its issues, and what are the approaches? So what is DFMA? DFMA is a way of thinking that strives to make manufacture and assembly easier and quicker, but without compromising on quality or functionality of the product. Ultimately, it's an opportunity that leads to cost savings. It's a product of the automation endeavours of the late '70s and early '80s, when many manufacturers identified that assembly was the biggest consumer of labor in manufacturing. To challenge this, many manufacturers adopted a new approach now known as DFMA which aims to optimise material costs, optimise manufacturing processes, minimise the complexity of product solutions, and reduce overall time to market. Today, DFMA is well recognised as a component of lean manufacturing. Put simply, DFMA is a way of thinking that aims to optimise the design at an early stage to consider its future manufacture and assembly. Now, why do we need DFMA? Well, 75% to 85% of our overall product cost is committed during the design and planning stage. Ensuring we consider DFMA at the early stages has the potential to eliminate 20% to 30% of our future assembly costs. That's a significant and huge cost-saving opportunity. If you take a look at the diagram now appearing on your screen, you'll see down the bottom here, we've got the overarching product development process, from concept design, detailed design, construction, and then system use. And then up the y-axis, we've got contribution, shown as a percentage, and we've got three things shown on this diagram. We've got cost committed, which is the arrow just here, this green one. We've got cost incurred, which is this red arrow just here, this one, and then we've got ease of change, which is this orange arrow, just down at the bottom here. If we look at the concept generation phase, what you'll see is that the cost committed-66% of our future costs are determined during this phase. Our costs incurred is quite low. And the reason for that is that the biggest cost at this moment in time is, really, people. But these people-the decisions that they're making are contributing to 66% of the overall future product costs. That's significant. As we move into detailed design stage, we will then start to spend a little bit more cash on things like prototypes. What you now see is that overall, 80% of our cost committed is finalised by the end of detailed design stage. Costs incurred start to increase, as we've now started to spend a little bit more money on some of the decisions that we made during concept design. Page 1/3 By the time we move into construction and system use, only 20% of our future product costs are left to be determined. As you'll see, cost incurred starts to increase. And the reason for that is that a lot of the decisions that we made in the earlier stages we're now starting to implement. So we're now starting to invest in things like tooling, maintenance costs for the tools. So cost incurred is starting to, increase whereas costs committed-there's not much more in terms of design decisions to be made, so costs incurred starts to level off. What you'll also notice is, the ease of change decreases the farther into the product development process we go. And the reason for that is that once you start to invest in things like injection moulds and tooling, it becomes much harder to change the design. So ensuring we get the product design right at the concept design stage is crucial. We need to ensure we're making the right decisions at this stage, as the future overall product costs are most determined at this stage. The benefits of DFMA are that it supports the adoption of concurrent engineering. So it supports multidisciplinary, team-based activities. It provides guidance to design teams to help them simplify product structures, reduce manufacturing assembly costs, increase productivity, and quantify the improvements, ultimately helping them to deliver better solutions. DFMA also helps to highlight deficiencies in existing product design with respect to automation capability. And these benefits also apply to manual assembly. By ensuring we can set up how the product is going to be manufactured means we can maximise on the automation capabilities we have available to us and ensure we design products that are capable of being manufactured with what we have available. The key issues that we might encounter when implementing DFMA are, interactions between product and manufacturing process should be understood and considered. It's important that our designers don't just have an understanding of the design process, but they also understand the different manufacturing processes available to them. We also have to ensure that everyone in our organisation understands that design decisions have an associated cost. Any decision that we make about the design of a product, whether we change something, whether we keep it the same way, whether we modify it slightly-all of these will have an associated cost, and decisions shouldn't be taken lightly. We also have to ensure that product manufacturing decisions must be made in parallel. In organisation's that support concurrent engineering this can be made slightly easier, as the organisation culture is already used to work in multidisciplinary teams. However, in more traditional structures, where it's a much more over-the-wall approach to product development, where products are passed from department to department, and departments make their own internal decisions, ensuring that you've got your design team making decisions in parallel with your manufacturers can be quite difficult. In terms of DFMA, the product design must also be carefully matched to advanced flexible manufacturing, assembly, quality control, and material handling. We have to ensure we have a good understanding of our organisation's capabilities and design products that we're capable of producing. In terms of DFMA approaches and how you may approach that subject, it's convenient to divide the subject into two considerations. The first is organisational and management issues, and the second is methods and tools. Looking at the organisational and management issues, as we've said, DFMA supports concurrent engineering, so it's supportive of multidisciplinary, team-based activities. However, you have to think about-it requires the integration of diverse and complex information. So you need to Page 2/3 consider, what sort of organisational structure do you currently have in your organisation? What sort of management structure do you currently have in your organisation? Do you have any potential issues for communication? It's important to consider all of these aspects to ensure successful implementation of DFMA. The second topic is methods and tools. And it's important that you use appropriate methods and tools for the product that you're developing at that moment in time. You also have to understand that there's different costs associated with different methods, and it's good to understand the costs associated with each. You may also want to think about training in the DFMA guidelines and general awareness for all of your staff, so that everyone is familiar with the general concept of DFMA. Page 3/3
