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.