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Eli Whitney practiced an early form of DFM when he designed a new rifle which he had to manufacture without proven capability from machines, not by hand. Henry Ford obviously employed DFM when his factories worked up the learning curve and drove down production costs on an assembly line. It all started with an initial design that was then refined in production.
Those and many early projects were rudimentary compared to the complexity of today’s Design for Manufacturing practiced here at Innovent. With our precision machining focus and cleanroom capability for final assembly, the complexity of our manufacturing projects is much more severe. And, since much of the work we do is for OEMs but with low production rates, the DFM has to be much more right the first time. Henry Ford took years and thousands of autos to drive down his costs, we don’t get that luxury.
In the 1960s, General Electric developed their “manufacturing producibility handbook”. In the 1980s and 1990s, the increased formality of manufacturing systems created Design for Manufacturability as an engineering discipline with detailed processes and checklists developed for a wide range of specific product types.
For any DFM project, careful consideration must be given to functionality, cost, quality, and time to market early in the design process. It is much less expensive to identify and fix a problem during the design phase. Holding frequent design reviews with multifunctional disciplines is essential.
Particularly in the semiconductor material handling and robotic component work that Innovent does, component design, material selection, and assembly methods will have a tremendous impact on the cost of manufacturing.
These are just a few of the questions we explore and answer in our Design for Manufacturing work. Our specific expertise is knowing how our precision machining and cleanroom final assembly can be best employed to make parts at the lowest possible cost with high quality the first time through low-rate production. We also have ready access to a number of partners in the semiconductor and medical manufacturing specialties nearby in high tech Massachusetts, to draw in outside expertise for even more complex DFM projects.