Knowledge Retention using DFMPro

Robin, Operations Manager at one of the most productive sites of Rapid Productions Limited, was looking one year ahead. The last year was a breeze. Once again, his operations were the toast of the company. But he knew that the next year was going to be a challenge and he also knew why. One of the reasons of the success of his operations was the experience of the design and manufacturing departments. Many of the engineers has spent their lifetime at Rapid Productions and were thoroughly aware of the design to manufacturing requirements. There were design engineers, who were aware of manufacturability aspects and there were manufacturing engineers who knew why a design was created in the way it was. But the problem Robin had was that many of these engineers were nearing retirement. As a matter of fact, 2-3 of them were retiring next year. Robin knew that much of the high productivity of the operations could be attributed to the limited number design-manufacturing iteration they had. Robin could easily identify that this was an important factor based on his past experience and he knew that he needed to do something about it. The design engineers were very aware of the manufacturing capabilities of the organization and especially of that site and ensure that their design took these “design for manufacturing” aspects into account. They were not only good at design but also understood the manufacturing implications. Additionally, the experience of the manufacturing engineers was also at hand. Robin understood that with these engineers leaving a lot of the knowledge they had acquired over the years would be lost. This would definitely affect the productivity of the site operations. New engineers joining the organization would take time in understanding the organization specific guidelines. He needed some mechanism to capture the available knowledge and reuse it. Though he knew that he would not be able to capture all 100% DFM knowledge, he wanted to try to setup a system using which they could create a knowledge management framework for DFM.

His search led him to DFMPro, software for automating DFM reviews with a rich set of APIs using which the software could be customized to handle organization specific DFM guidelines as well. Robin set up a task force comprising a few of the experienced design and manufacturing engineers. He also got the help of the customization services of Geometric, the company which developed DFMPro. The task force was assigned a project for a duration of 3 months in which they planned to capture the most important DFM guidelines in the form of customized DFMPro rules. One important feature of DFMPro was that it was integrated within the CAD environment so the rules could be checked during the design stage and corrected if required. Additionally, it also provided batch mode of operation with report generation using which multiple designs could be processed overnight and the generated reports could be viewed offline.

The task force set about religiously capturing the various scenarios, lessons learnt and knowledge gained over so many years in the form of rules embedded within DFMPro. Though some rules had to be noted only in the form of documents or checklists, many of the critical rules of thumb and manufacturing guidelines were successfully transferred to the software. Within a month or so, they had made significant progress. Robin decided to try out the system as a prototype for a few newly recruited design engineers. He was recently facing complaints from the manufacturing department about their lack of manufacturing knowledge. So, he decided to evaluate the newly developed automated DFM review system with the help of these guys. He observed that within a few days after deploying the new system, the design change requests sent by manufacturing showed a decline. Within a few more months, the complete system was in place. The retiring engineers monitored the performance of the system and contributed their knowledge to make it a success. The operation reviews showed that things were improved and the productivity of the new engineers was improving. Robin was happy with the results. Now that he had installed the system in place, he could face the productivity targets of the forthcoming year without any worries.

To know more about the ways in which you can benefit from DFMPro, write to dfmpro.marketing@geometricglobal.com

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Reduced quotes using changes suggested by DFMPro can help manufacturers bag more business

Jimmy works in a manufacturing firm, OnTrack, which delivers machined, turned and fabricated components based on requirements from its clients. The firm operates in a very competitive environment where they have to bid for the manufacturing contracts from clients and compete with at least ten to twelve other firms to win a bid. Generally, the vendors are on equal ground on quality so the winner is generally decided based on cost. OnTrack was struggling to survive since, given the current levels of resources they had, costs could not be reduced further. They had to innovate to survive in this cut throat market. Jimmy was given the job of coming up with ideas and solutions for this tough situation.

Jimmy researched in the market and came across DFMPro, an automated tool that supports several common Design for Manufacturing guidelines for machining and fabrication which helps to produce parts economically with better quality, shorter time and readily available machining tools. Jimmy realized that by employing DFMPro, they could come up with design suggestions which could reduce the manufacturing cost.

For example, in some designs, machined pockets were designed to have sharp corners whereas they were not important from a functional standpoint. Similarly, many designers had a habit of chamfering or filleting all parts edges which again was unnecessary and resulted in increased cost. In many cases, hole diameters were different from standard available tool sizes. For large runs, tool and setup customization may be acceptable but it would drastically affect the cost for short runs.

Such design modifications for ease of manufacturing could be suggested to the client. These could reduce not only the cost of manufacturing but also the time required for delivery. If the customer was ok with these changes, OnTrack could submit a reduced bid and thus possibly get the contract. Jimmy got an evaluation version of DFMPro for SolidWorks and employed these techniques for a few bids and to his surprise, he got a positive response from the client. The prospect readily agreed with the suggested changes when he was informed of the impact those changes on the cost. Not only did OnTrack win the bid, but was named a preferred vendor for future bids. OnTrack was back on track to improving profits thanks to Jimmy and DFMPro.

Disclaimer: All names and characters mentioned in the stories are fictitious. Any resemblance with real characters/ entities should be considered as mere coincidence.

Reduce design change costs using DFMPro

Harvey, a Senior Engineer with First Choice Electronics, is faced with a tough problem. First Choice produces electronic goods like notebooks, LCD(s) and cell phones. These products have very short life spans. The company needs to innovate and bring new ideas to the market rapidly. Consequently, its design to manufacturing cycle has to be as small as possible. Any lapses or rework lengthens the time to market and the competition noses ahead. So, First Choice has always tried to avoid any design changes which could affect the time to market. However, invariably they have faced design change issues due to various reasons over the years. These changes also increase the cost of producing the product by around 25%. Thankfully, their competitors face the same issues. Hence, this issue has not become a bottleneck.

This year, the global economy faced a recession. World wide, companies experienced dips in sales. Many companies started laying off some of their workforce to reduce cost. First Choice, however, had other plans. They valued their people and decided to take actions to reduce costs in other addressable areas. One of these areas was design changes. Reducing the number of design changes could help First Choice directly improve their bottom-line. First Choice set a target of reducing their design changes to reduce cost by 10% by the end of first year. Harvey was assigned the task of achieving this goal.

Harvey began by studying the various design changes made in the company over the past couple years. He sorted them according to their impact on cost. High cost items occurring frequently needed to be dealt with on a priority. The next step was to formulate a process to detect any factor which could lead to a design change during the design stage itself. One possibility was to create a checklist document which would be manually verified by designer before submitting the design. However, the manual checking process was error prone and would consume significant time for complex models. A tool was needed to implement the checklist in software.

Harvey did some research and came across DFMPro. DFMPro provides a rule framework which could be used to add the design checklist rules as customized rules. The rules could operate on the design features or manufacturing features automatically identified from the model by DFMPro using patented feature recognition technology. This would automate the manual review process. Any design element which could possibly require a change later could be captured in the rule. The rule instance would result in a failure, identifying the problematic area of the design. The designer could then correct it at that point, thus saving an iteration and rework later on.

DFMPro was set up and evaluated for a month. Using DFMPro APIs, rules specific to First Choice were scripted and embedded into the software. Designers started using DFMPro during the design stage. During the month, Harvey identified around 20 possible instances in various designs which could have led to design change requests later on. In one month of evaluation, First Choice could see definite savings which not only covered the cost of DFMPro but contributed directly to the bottom-line. First Choice decided to complete DFMPro deployment and rewarded Harvey for his contribution to the cost saving effort!

Disclaimer: All names and characters mentioned in the stories are fictitious. Any resemblance with real characters/ entities should be considered as mere coincidence.