The role of DFA in the product development process

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1.0 Introduction The primary aim of companies is to make money. The process by which manufacturing companies achieve this is to ensure their profit margins are high, that is to say the cost of their product is greater than the cost of creating that product from initial concept through to manufacture. In a competitive market situation, ignoring customer loyalty and other factors, the lower cost products tend to provide a greater market share for their respective companies. This is no more evident that in the current financial climate where customer capacity to afford certain products has been reduced. Therefore to ensure that the ‘motto’ mentioned above is maintained companies must aim to reduce all costs within the product development process. Since the vast majority of an individual product cost is designed into it, roughly around 80% (1), cost reduction is best found in the design stage and as a result this will reduce costs further along the product development process. Companies have tended to attempt and for the more successful ones achieve this using a number of systems / processes; most notably ‘Lean Manufacturing’ as shown by Toyota’s Production System, Six Sigma, the use of Theory of Constraints and Statistical Process Control and DFMA (2). 1.1 Abbreviations JIT – Just in Time DFA – Design for Assembly DFM – Design for Manufacture DFMA – Design for Manufacture and Assembly QFD – Quality Function Development CAD – Computer Aided Design CAM – Computer Aided Manufacture CAE – Computer Aided Engineering FMEA – Failure Mode and Effect Analysis 2.0 DFMA Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DFMA) is a technique that is concerned with reducing the cost of a product through simplification of it’s deign. In essence this is best achieved by reducing the number of parts of the product and then ensuring the parts that are left are relatively easy to
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