Design and Manufacturing are going through a phase of tremendous transformation due to the advent of new manufacturing technologies, widespread manufacturing networks, decentralized design centers, and the use of new materials. With new products being launched in the market daily, apart from time to market, the success of a product heavily depends on two key aspects: Quality and Cost. For this, design engineers need advanced enterprise solutions that provide upstream visibility into a product’s manufacturability health and increased awareness about the impact of early design decisions on the cost of the product. However, apart from designers, other key stakeholders, like manufacturing teams, can benefit significantly from solutions that reduce the impact of late engineering changes on cost, quality, and time. To date, an “Over the wall” design process has been and is reflective of a typical method of designing and manufacturing products.
In this process, every department works and completes its tasks independently without consulting the other departments about the impacts of their decisions. This process is error-prone and cumbersome and introduces high levels of rework due to communication loss. In our context, the design team needs to know its requirements and throw designs over the wall, expecting the manufacturing teams to figure out ways to produce them. However, this approach leads to either difficult or very expensive products to manufacture. This, in turn, affects the sales of products because they are costly to sell in a price-sensitive market.
The reason for this approach is that quality was perceived as a headache of manufacturing while effective cost management was done by costing experts. However, with the rapidly changing product landscape, this mindset is changing, and organizations are focusing on “concurrent and collaborative engineering,” where what is designed gets manufactured with minimal rework and cost impact. This has put the design teams in the spotlight, where they are expected to cover the estimated 70% of the cost of the product right during the design stage, which means collaborating effectively, understanding critical factors that impact manufacturing, and reducing downstream overheads. Organizations are looking to eliminate the communication gap that exists between design and manufacturing with the help of robust solutions to drive standardization across these different silos.
Even traditional collaboration workflows involving design reviews by manufacturing and cost experts are not scalable due to significant bandwidth issues faced by SMEs. Hence, it is important that design engineers are empowered to make decisions that are automatically reviewed against best practices defined by SMEs. In case of conflicts or additional expert inputs, the SMEs are involved only.
Organizations are also realizing the importance of traceability in the health of a design throughout its lifecycle to ensure effective corrective actions are taken. The goal is to track any downstream quality of cost issue right to each revision level of a design. Many organizations are now tasked to look for a solution that addresses these core aspects for implementing a successful DFX strategy, which will enable them to release products faster and ensure they remain relevant in today’s fast-paced world.
To aid this transformation, DFMPro has now become an all-encompassing DFX solution that supports a holistic approach to design.
The powerful DFX platform enables manufacturing validation that is closely tied to feature-based cost, which empowers design engineers with the right level of information to make educated decisions early in the design cycle. This rough order of magnitude cost (ROM) enables a design direction that includes both cost and quality aspects of a successful design. It puts the design phase on the right track right from the get-go, allowing early design changes based on feedback from key stakeholders. Organizations can ensure that both DFM and cost inputs are vetted and captured in an automated workflow that gives confidence to the design engineers about not only the design recommendations provided by the system but also understanding the impact of these decisions on the eventual cost of the part.
However, generating this massive manufacturability data is only useful if it can be comprehended easily. To aid this, the DFX platform also has a powerful Analytics module that enables excellent tracking of designs across various teams to their logical closure and provides a complete picture of the product lifecycle for management consumption. Effective collaboration is vital in the value chain to ensure that all design and manufacturing aspects are covered seamlessly. To enable this, DFMPro also allows easy integrations with leading PLM systems to store and share valuable data for faster reviews, thus completing the ecosystem.
Combining these three powerful elements enabled by one platform (DFM + Cost + Analytics) that works inside a CAD/PLM space is the ideal solution for smarter global enterprises.