DFA

Boothroyd Dewhurst's Design for Assembly Software

The new DFA software offers engineers more tools for analysing design concepts and creating innovative products with fewer parts. It not only allows you to quantify assembly time and labour costs, but it challenges you to simplify the structure of your products and therein reduce part costs as well as assembly costs. 

Simplicity pays Off

Design for Assembly is a methodology for evaluating product designs. It is a quantifiable way to identify unnecessary parts in an assembly and to determine assembly times and costs. 

The assembly time standards built-in to the software are based on extensive research confirmed by years of industrial usage. They cover wire harness and printed circuit board assembly as well as mechanical assembly. There are full-featured user-editable databases for your company’s standard items and special operations. 

Using DFA software, product engineers assess the cost contribution of each part and then simplify the product concept through part reduction strategies. These strategies involve incorporating as many features into one part as is economically feasible. The outcome of a DFA-based design is a more elegant product with fewer parts that is both functionally efficient and easy to assemble. The larger benefits of a DFA-based design are reduced part costs, improved quality and reliability, and shorter development cycles.

Use the DFA Software to: - 

• Create Products that are functionally efficient and easy to assemble
• Explore designs that improve product quality and reliability
• Estimate assembly costs for alternative designs
• Redesign to reduce manufacturing and assembly costs
• Shorten overall product development time for your organisation

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Benefits of DFA software

• Estimate difficulty of assembly. 
  Establish a rating for your product design in terms of its difficulty of assembly. The DFA software rates each part according to how it is grasped, oriented and moved for insertion and to how it is inserted and/or fastened onto the product.
• Support decision-making.
  The DFA software provides objective, consensus-building information so your team can examine all the potential design solutions and select the most effective approach. Incorporate with ease, product input from other groups, such as field service and marketing.
• Benchmark existing products
  The DFA index, a measure of assembly efficiency, serves as a basis for quantitatively comparing design alternatives internally or against competing products. The software gives an objective measure independent of size or complexity.
• Add focus to design reviews
  DFA analysis can guide the progress of a design, verifying improvement as it evolves. As redundant parts or operations are eliminated, and assembly difficulties are removed, the assembly efficiency scores noticeably improve.
• Sharpen design skills
  The software helps designers establish the theoretical minimum number of parts for a product. In the process, engineers identify design concepts that reduce unnecessary complexity and cost.
• Integrate design and manufacturing
  The DFA approach gives an overall structure for making design changes in light of related material and manufacturing costs. Used together, DFA and DFM enable engineers to select appropriate and cost-effective shape-forming processes for components.
• See Fast Results From the Start
  DFA software promotes systematic thinking about every part in an assembly

“DFMA is a fundamental business process for the Dell engineering team because it supports our holistic approach to cost. It helps us analyze our designs and make decisions that lower overall costs, not just product costs.”
“Increased manufacturing throughput, reduced damage rates, higher quality, streamlined logistics, and faster delivery are all outcomes of weaving DFMA into the development cycle.”

“No New Factories,” Desktop Engineering, Jan 2004

Download a DFMA e-Brochure or Click here to request more information