Eric Chapel was elated. He had just signed a outsourcing contract with a South American firm, EngineersAtWork. The arrangement would save his company, JK and Sons, around a million dollars a year. JK and Sons designed and manufactured ventilation systems for large businesses. The South American firm was going to provide him with Engineering Services at half the cost of what it would take in the UK. The icing on the cake was that he had a strong buy-in from the designers in the UK. The reason behind that was simple – the portion of the tasks getting outsourced was only the creation of design variants. The designers based in UK would control the creation of new designs whereas any new variants of existing designs would be handled by EngineersAtWork under their guidance. Thus the team could handle more jobs leading to additional revenue and higher productivity. Things looked rosy.
Design Engineers in the UK would receive requirements for a new variant, prepare specifications for the required design changes and send them over to EngineersAtWork, who would, in turn, complete the required changes, create the new variant and send it back. As time passed, Eric was slowly losing his sleep on the problems which slowly started surfacing with the arrangement. Slowly, manufacturability issues started showing up in the designs being created by EngineersAtWork. Design rework began affecting the project schedules. Eric did not have any problem with the attitude and dedication of the team at EngineersAtWork. He knew that they were sincere and committed in their efforts. It was just that they did not the required shop floor experience. The original designs created by the engineers in the UK were great examples of easy to manufacture components. However, changes being introduced by the designers at EngineersAtWork were causing manufacturing problems. The designs were as per the specifications created by the team in the UK but they did not adhere to the manufacturing guidelines. One way out was to tighten the design specs to include the manufacturing checklists but that would definitely be overkill. Creating specifications would take an unrealistic amount of time. Going through manual checklists was also time consuming. Most of the manufacturing knowledge of the design engineers at JK and Sons was built from years of experience and visits to the shop floor. Though they were reviewing the designs they received, some issues would persist. Eric wanted some tool which the team at EngineersAtWork could use for manufacturability analysis.
It was then his friend Gus suggested DFMPro. Gus was using this tool in his organization. He told Eric that it really helped his fresh-out-of-college design engineers quickly come up to speed with manufacturing aspects of a design. Eric got EngineersAtWork to start using the tool. The results started showing in a few weeks. The manufacturability issues slowly disappeared. The tool also identified certain issues in the original designs which also brought down the manufacturing time and cost. Thanks to DFMPro, JK and Sons and EngineersAtWork successfully celebrated their first year of association.
Visit dfmpro.geometricglobal.com or write to dfmpro.marketing@geometricglobal.com for more information on how you can benefit from DFMPro.
Disclaimer: All names and characters mentioned in the stories are fictitious. Any resemblance with real characters/ entities should be considered as mere coincidence
