Design IV - DFMA & Design Engineering

Design Management

What if you could quickly investigate numerous approaches to your design, simply by plugging variables into a program?

What if you could tweak the process, the materials, the parts…and see, in seconds, how those changes affect cost and manufacturability?

What if you could confidently move forward with a design that met your team’s requirements—and was also the least expensive, contained the fewest parts, and was the easiest to manufacture?

What if you could use the same program to generate detailed lists that you could send to manufacturing, lists that communicated clearly what you had in mind—documenting designs that made the most sense from a manufacturing point of view?

You could use these same lists and alternative concepts to present your ideas to your top managers.

Best of all, what if optimum manufacturability was built into your designs—from the start?

Engineers who use DFMA reduce or even eliminate those costly, back-and-forth tweaking exercises which normally plague the product development process.

With DFMA software tools, your design team can:

Quickly explore different design alternatives before committing to a particular design
Investigate manufacturing processes that you normally don’t use, processes that could save time and money (for example, injection moulding versus sheet metal stamping)
Analyse processes and material combinations for individual parts
Utilise the data in your existing Bills of Materials (BOMs) and CAD files to populate the variables, then generate a new BOM
Compare manufacturing processes and material combinations before CAD data is generated

Cost Management	Executive Management	Manufacturing
You have a target cost in mind for a new or existing product. What are the main contributors to the cost of the product? DFMA tools can answer that question for you. They can also help you work more effectively with your design and manufacturing engineers, and outside suppliers. more >	"What will it cost to produce this? How can we reduce the cost without sacrificing quality?" Our tools make it possible for you to obtain answers to these questions that are based on real-life, accurate data. Data that can be used to support productive, objective discussions, improve products while reducing costs, and hold suppliers to reliable "should cost" estimates. more >	"You want me to manufacture this design? You're joking, right?" If you find yourself asking this question more often than you'd like, DFMA can help. You and your design engineers can quickly analyse and manipulate different design approaches. The resulting lean design will contain fewer parts and be easier to manufacture. more >

Your boss is at the design meeting...

Your boss says the part has to cost less and makes a design suggestion. Then your boss turns to you.
“What if we make that simple change?”
You think, “There’s no such a thing as a ‘simple change.’” Your answer: “It’s possible. But I’ll have to run the numbers and get back to you in a day or two.” You wish you had a better answer, but it’s the best you can do.
What if you could get back to them in a half hour? Or less?
Or, what if, even before you were in that meeting, you were able to efficiently “run the numbers” on a variety of approaches, so you were better prepared to answer those “what if” questions in the meeting?
And what if each approach was thoroughly documented, so you could discuss the tradeoffs using real data?
You’d have the answers you needed to move forward, and to create market-leading products.

Real data. Better decisions. That’s the power of DFMA.

For more details on DFMA, click here.