Design for Manufacturing & Design for Assembly

Design for
Manufacturing
and
Design for
Assembly

Prepare by:

T.F. Cheng
September 2001

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Design for Manufacturing & Design for Assembly

Design for Manufacturing and Design for Assembly

Summary of DFM and DFA

Design for manufacturing (DFM) is aimed at manufacturing costs while simultaneously

improving (or at less not inappropriately compromising) product quality, development time,
and development cost.

DFM begins with the concept development phase and system-level design phase, in
these phases important decisions must made with the manufacturing cost implications in
mind.

Since accurate cost estimation is very difficult, much of DFM practice involves making
informed decisions in the absence of detailed cost data.

Component costs are reduced by understanding what drives these costs, solutions may
involve novel component design concepts or the incremental improvement of existing
design through simplification and standardization.

Assembly costs can be reduced by following well-established design-for assembly (DFA)

guidelines. Components can be registered to simplify, assembly operations, or
components can eliminated entirely by integration of their function into other
components.

Reduction of manufacturing support cost begins with an understanding of the drivers of

complexity in the production process. Design decisions have a large impact on the costs
of supporting production. Choices should be mode with these effects in mind, even
though overhead cost estimates are often insensitive to such changes.

DFM is an integrative methodology taking place throughout the development process

and requiring inputs from across the development team.

DFM decisions can affect product development lead time, product development cost, and
product quality. Trade-off will frequently be necessary between manufacturing cost and
these equally important broader issues.

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Design for Manufacturing & Design for Assembly

1. Design for Manufacturing (DFM) and Design for Assembly (DFA)

Design for manufacturing (DFM) is the practice of designing products with

manufacturing in mind. It simultaneously considers all of the design goals and constraints for
product that will be manufactured. The ultimate is that product can:

Be designed in the least time with the least development cost.

Make the quickest and smoothest transition into production.
Be assembled and tested with minimum cost in the minimum amount of time.
Have the desired levels of quality and reliability.
Satisfy customers’ needs and compete well in the marketplace.

Design for Assembly (DFA) is a structured methodology for analyzing product concepts
or existing products for simplification of the design and its assembly process, reduction in
parts and assembly operations, and individual part geometry changes to ease assembly.

Design for Manufacturing and Assembly is a comprehensive approach in production of

products and integrates the design process with materials, manufacturing methods, process
planning, assembly, testing, and quality assurance. The trend now is to combine design for
manufacturing and assembly which recognizes the inherent interrelationships between design
and manufacturing.

2. How is it different from traditional design and manufacturing?

Traditionally design and manufacturing are two separate activities undertaken by

different specialists and work separately. DFM is a new approach to pull design and
manufacturing together during the early stage of design through reminding designers or
engineers to think about the manufacture issues of the product during the design stage.

3. The need for DFM & DFA

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Design for Manufacturing & Design for Assembly

DFM is important because design affects 80% of the total cost incurred in product
development and quality product can only be achieved by quality design. Also:

a. Competitions-nowadays many markets are highly competitive, and products may come
under intense competition, if they are not already. A product’s vulnerability to
competition may be revealed by asking how much better could the product be deigned
for:

The same function at lower cost.

Better quality and reliability.
Better delivery.
More responsiveness to customer needs.
Faster development of new products.

b. Design and manufacturing must be intimately interrelated from separate disciplines or

activities into a concurrent or simultaneous activities.

c. Product must be design in such a way that it not only meets design requirements and
specification, but also can be manufactured economically and with relative ease.

4. What kind of benefit can be gained by applying DFM?

Cutting of cost

Cost of design changes — Optimum design with careful considerations in every aspects from
design to manufacturing helps to avoid design changes in the later stage thus reduce
the chances of cost incurred by design changes.

Assembly cost — Lower assembly costs resulted from easier assembly motions with fewer
parts, easier to build and assemble leading to the minimum amount of manual
labour.

Component cost — Having fewer parts to purchase saves purchasing expense, especially for
standard.

Quality cost — Lower cost of quality resulted from simpler design and from foolproof
assembly.

Capital cost — Designing products for less dependence on special equipment saves
equipment capital and avoids production delays caused by waiting for delivery. The
use of standardized parts results in less setup than is usually necessary when
nonstandard parts are used. This results in greater machinery utilization. The end
result is lower capital equipment costs.

Significant improvement in quality

Quality can be designed in, with optimal part selection and proper integration of parts,
for minimum interaction problems.

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Design for Manufacturing & Design for Assembly

High quality results from fewer parts, foolproof assembly, easy-to-inspect features, the
use of more standardized parts with know good quality, and a good utilization of stable
factory process.

Improvement in reliability

Higher reliability is achieved by using proven parts and proven processes serviceability,
delivery, customer acceptance, and general competitive posture.

Time to market

DFM products get to market sooner because they fit right into existing processes and do
not require special equipment and procedures. The use of standard parts means that most will
be on hand or be easy to obtain. The result of considering manufacturing issue early is fewer
product problems; that will lead to quick and smooth product introduction.

Superior product design

The underlying principle of DFM is to consider all goals and constraints early so the
designers can quickly converge on the optimal solution. This not only assures that a quality
product can be introduced quickly and sold at an attractive price, but the design methodology
also encourages better satisfaction of customers’ needs, the ultimate criterion for success in
the market place.

5. How to practice Design for Manufacturing?

DFM requires a cross-function team:

Design for manufacturing is one of the very integrative methodologies involved in

product development. DFM utilizes information of several types, including:

Sketches, drawings, productions, and design alternatives;

Detail understanding of production and assembly processes;
Estimates of manufacturing costs, production volumes.

DFM therefore requires the contributions of most members of the development team as
well as outside experts. DFM efforts commonly draw upon expertise from manufacturing
engineers, cost accountants, and production personnel, in addition to product designers. Many
companies used structured, team-based workshops to facilitate the integration and sharing, of
views required for DFM.

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6. Design Process

Propose Design

Estimate the manufacturing costs

Reduce Supporting
Reduce component costs Reduce Assembly costs
production costs

Impact of DFM on Alternative

other factory Design(s)

Recalculate the
manufacturing costs

No Good Enough?

Yes

Acceptable Design

7. Elements of manufacturing cost

The manufacturing costs for a product development are categorized in the following
figure. Under this scheme, the unit manufacturing cost of a product consists of costs in three
categories:

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Design for Manufacturing & Design for Assembly

Manufacturing Costs

Component Assembly Overhead

Equipment and Indirect

Standard Custom Labour Support
Tooling allocation

Raw material Processing Tooling

a. Component costs — The components of a product (also simply called parts of the
product) may include standard parts purchased from suppliers e.g. screws. Other
components would be custom parts, made according to the manufacture’s design from
raw material such as sheet steel.
b. Assembly costs — The process of assembly almost always incurs labour costs and may
also incur costs for equipment and tooling.
c. Overhead cost — This encompass all of the other costs. It van be further categorized in
two type of overhead:

Support costs — associated with material handling, quality assurance, purchasing,

shipping, facilities, equipment/tooling maintenance. These are the support systems
required to manufacture the product, and these costs do greatly depend upon the product
design. Nevertheless, since these costs are often shared by more than one product line,
they are lumped together in the category of overhead.
Indirect allocation — the costs of manufacturing that cannot be directly linked to a
particular product but which must be paid for to be in business. For example, the salary
of the security guard and the cost of maintenance to the building and grounds are indirect
costs because these are shared among several different products and are difficult to
allocate directly to specific product. Because indirect costs are not specifically linked to
the design of the product, they are not relevant to DFM, even though they do contribute
to the cost of the product.

Accurately, estimating overhead costs for a new product is difficult, and the industry
practices are not very satisfying. Most firms assign overhead charges by using overhead rates.
Overhead change rates are added to direct costs, for example, to the cost of any purchased
materials, the cost of assembly Labour, and the number of hours of equipment time the
product consumes. For example, the overhead rate for purchased materials might be 10% and
the overhead rate for assembly labour might be 80%. Under these conditions, a product
containing $100 of purchased components and $10 of assembly labour would incur $18 of
overhead costs.

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8. Fixed costs versus Variable costs

Another way to divide manufacturing costs is between fixed costs and variable costs.

Fixed costs — constant and do not depend on the level of production output. There is no
difference between the production volume of one thousand to one million.

Variable costs — change in close proportion with production rate or volume. It is in direct
proportional to the number of units produced.

9. Break-even analysis

It is common that the design team needs to specify the production process. One
important consideration is to assess the effect of changes in production output (volume) on
costs, revenues and profit.

Break-even analysis is:

A method of assessing the effect of changes in production output on costs, revenues and
profits.
It makes use of the concept of dividing manufacturing costs into fixed and variable costs
to calculate the range of production volumes necessary for profitable operation.

The break-even point is the output level at which total costs equal revenues and the profit
is zero.

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Design for Manufacturing & Design for Assembly

The break-even chart is an important tool for the analysis of many production problems.
It can be used to:

Show how the profits or losses will vary for different output levels.
Show the effect of changes of output level on the costs of different methods of
production. To assist equipment and process selection.
Use for plant capacity planning, equipment replacement studies and make buy decisions.

10. Reduce the assembly costs

Design for Assembly (DFA) is a fairly well established subset of DFM which involves
minimum the cost of assembler. For most products, assembly contributes a relatively small
fraction of the total cost. Nevertheless, focusing attention on assembly cost yields strong
indirect benefits. Often as a result of emphasis on DFA, the overall parts count, manufacturing
complexity, and support costs are all reduced along with the assembly cost.

Maximize Ease of Assembly

The ideal characteristics of a part for an assembly are:

Part is inserted from the top of the assembly — The attribute of a part and assembly is
called z-axis assembly. By using z-axis assembly for all parts, the assembly never has to
be inverted, gravity helps to stabilize the partial assembly, and the assembly worker can
generally see the assembler location.
Part is self-aligning — Parts that require line position in order to be assembled required
slow, precise movements on the part of the assembly worker. Parts and assembly sites
can be designed to be self-aligning so that line motor control is not required of the
worker. The most common self-alignment feature is the chamfer. A chamfer can be
implemented as a tapered lead on the end of a peg, or a conical widening at the opening
of a hole.
Part does not need to be oriented — Parts requiring correct orientation, such as screw
require more assembly time than parts requiring no orientation, such as a sphere. In the
worst case, part must be oriented correctly in three dimensions.
Part requires only one hand for assembly — This characteristic relates primarily to the
size of the part and the effort required to manipulate the part. All other things being equal,
parts requiring one hand to assemble require less time than parts requiring two hands,
which in turn require less effort than parts requiring a crane or lift to assemble.
Part requires no tools — Assembly operations requiring tools generally required more
time than those that do not.
Part is assembled in a single, linear motion — Pushing in a pin requires less time than
driving a screw. For this reason, numerous fasteners are commercially available that
require only a single, linear motion for insertion.
Part is secured immediately upon insertion — Some parts require a subsequent securing
operation, such a tightening, curing, or the addition of another part. Until the part is
secured, the assembly may be unstable requiring extra care fixtures or shower assembly.

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