Design for Manufacturing is on the rise.
Manufacturers globally are seeking to drive efficiency while simultaneously producing higher quality products. Through this, R&D and manufacturing engineers are both aligned and working together to help eliminate roadblocks that prevent them from delivering innovative products to market, faster. By enabling alignment and close collaboration within your workplace or organization, Design for Manufacturing (DfM) can make your product delivery easier than ever before - increasing your product success rates, reducing lead time, and presenting more cost-effective solutions.
Engineers often lack the necessary visibility into how their designs may impact the manufacturing process in traditional manufacturing environments. When production characteristics are underrepresented in engineering decisions, manufacturers tend to incur additional costs and time.
Manufacturing teams are often faced with design issues that are difficult, time-consuming, or costly to implement due to the fact they don't have access to product engineering information early in the process. To further complicate matters, manufacturing and product engineering rely on different systems, file formats, and tools. This lack of consistency forces manufacturing to rely upon multiple sources to access the necessary data - from bills of materials (BOMs) to computer-aided design (CAD) drawings and digital mock-ups (DMUs). Transforming these into a manufacturing bill of materials (MBOM), in order to provided a holistic view, can become extremely troublesome and complex.
With the help of Design for Manufacturing, or DfM, you can address these issues by allowing access to the necessary data, at the necessary time. DfM enables this by adhering to five key principles:
- Easily make decisions in engineering that are supported by manufacturing and/or operations. Make manufacturing engineering part of the early phases of product development. Clearly connect tasks to processes, enable better information sharing between designers and manufacturing, and more. System support for virtual builds/prototypes and mass customization is critical to this.
- Increase visibility between disciplines. Enable correct product manufacturing in early phases, reducing lead time and time to production. This is made possible through digital mock-ups and connected processes, products, and resources.
- Streamline BOM transformation between manufacturing planning and product design. Improve associativity and traceability across plant-specific MBOMs. Also, stream BOM reconciliation by leveraging plant-specific MBOM associativity and a unified change process. This helps improve product success rates and boosts reuse.
- Create a standards-based data exchange between product development and other enterprise systems. This can include Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS), Quality Management System (QMS), Manufacturing Execution System (MES), and/or manufacturing intelligence systems. By using consistent design and parts information across processes and people, it allows manufacturers to create and manage downstream deliverables. These deliverables may include process plans, instructions, documents, and more.
- Unify change management between product and manufacturing engineering. Changes that design engineers make always have downstream impacts. With increased visibility into the change process, manufacturers can assess the impact of that change earlier on. By planning ahead and optimizing the implementation of that change, your organization can significantly reduce both rework and scrap.
To realize the benefit of Design for Manufacturing (DfM) and satisfy these five key principles, manufacturers have to be able to manage variants in routing or manufacturing methods for the same part/product in varying factories. This involves:
-Manage design files, operational data, processes, parts, skills, documents, work instructions, etc.
-Leverage logic from configurable BOM when using process planning functionality.
-Support configuration management around manufacturing process planning.
-Support engineering change management in the manufacturing planning context.
-Integrate with APS, MES, QMS, manufacturing intelligence systems, etc.
-Support closed-loop manufacturing.
-Simulate various manufacturing methods or routings through manufacturing work centers.
The role of PLM in this process is also apparent. By utilizing Project Lifecycle Management (PLM) software and practices, manufacturers are able to address these requirements and comply with all of these principles. When you combine the worlds of engineering and production, PLM can provide a universally common view of shared data. PLM connects products, processes, and resources to their manufacturing requirements. Windchill is one PLM software that is helping to advance the industry today by dramatically decreasing time-to-market, helping to create optimal flows, improving efficiency, and delivering higher quality designs and products.
All in all, Design for Manufacturing (DfM) is an engineering practice/process that has the main goal of delivering higher quality products, more efficiently, and often times for a lower cost. It's on the radar for manufacturers striving to achieve high efficiency, increase collaboration, optimize product quality, and improve communication. DfM enables alignment and close collaboration abilities - allowing for an effective product the first time around. Paired with other software, DfM and the capabilities associated can be enhanced even further. Simplify, enhance, and refine your product designs and end results using DfM.
If you're interested in learning Design for Manufacturing (DfM), let us know or check out our Design for Manufacturing and Assembly course.
