The Other side of Design for Assembly

‘Design for Assembly is a process by which products are designed with ease of assembly in mind.’ This is how Wikipedia begins the page on Design for Assembly (DFA). DFA recognizes the need to analyze both the part design and the whole product for any assembly problem early in the design process.

GE Hitachi method, Lucas Method and Several other methods primarily concentrate on reducing the assembly time and cost of a product.

However, are these assembly problems the only ones every designer faces on a day-to-day basis? – Not at all! A designer needs to ensure that his design is complete and good-to-go for functional, performance, manufacturing and assembly requirements of the product. The designer will design the part and use various tools and techniques to check the design on various parameters

When the part fits into an assembly, things get a little more complex.

This whitepaper will go through various assembly level issues, which need to be tackled by various organizations on a regular basis. These issues are not restricted to ease of assembly but also address functional and performance requirements of the product. Traditional DFA methods and tools are skipped in the following sections, since the objective of this paper is to bring forth ‘the other side’ of DFA.