Design for Manufacturability: Optimizing Cost, Quality, and Time-To-Market

Design for Manufacturability is a proven design methodology that works for any size company. Early consideration of manufacturing issues shortens product development time, minimizes development cost, and ensures a smooth transition into production for the quickest time to market. Production Costs are lower because simpler designs can be assembled easier. DFM designs have fewer parts and fewer part types. This, in turn, results in less set-up, greater machinery utilization, and a better climate for Just-in-Time and Flexible Manufacturing.

Development time & costs are better because of concurrent engineering design teams, modular design, standard design features, common parts, use of existing plant equipment. This results in less "fire-fighting," engineering changes and less need for redesigns. Quality and Reliability are higher because of part quality optimization, proper integration, and the use of standard parts of known quality.

Dr. David M. Anderson is a Cambria, California, based management consultant who specializes in seminars, workshops, and consulting on design for manufacturability, cost reduction, build-to-order, and mass customization. He shows companies how to design products for manufacturability, rationalize product lines, standardize parts, and concurrently develop products and flexible processes agile environments.

He holds professional registrations in Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering and a Doctorate in Mechanical Engineering from UC, Berkeley.

He has also written the book, "Agile Product Development for Mass Customization," with an introduction by B. Joseph Pine II (McGraw-Hill Professional Publications, 1997). His next book will be on low-cost product development. He also wrote the opening chapter in the Tool and Manufacturing Engineers Handbook on DFM (Vol 6, published by Society of Manufacturing Engineers, Dearborn, MI, 1992) and the chapter on DFM and Mass Customization in the Quality Function Deployment Handbook (Wiley, 1997).

At the Haas Graduate School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, he created and taught the course "New Product Development, the Management and Design of Manufacturable Products" as part of the Management of Technology Program. Since 1989, he has facilitated the Suzaki/SME video program, Techniques for Continuous Improvement.

Dr. Anderson has over 25 years of industrial experience and has given over 20 public classes and over 55 in-house seminars on DFM to many leading companies including several divisions of Hewlett-Packard, Emerson Electric, GE, Bausch & Lomb, Northern Telecom, United Technologies, Loral, Kaiser Electronics, Guidant, Freightliner, Korea's LG group and many others. When he was Manager of Flexible Manufacturing at Intel's Systems Group, he initiated successful programs for Design For Manufacturability (DFM) and standardization of parts and tooling. From 1977 to 1983, his company, Anderson Automation, Inc., generated design studies and built special production equipment for companies such as IBM, FMC, Clorox, and Optical Coating Labs. As the ultimate concurrent engineering experience, he personally built the equipment he designed and is proficient at machining and welding. For DiGiorgio Corporation, he lead the product development team that designed a new generation food processin! g machine to replace the company's primary product, a machine that removed pits from peaches. The new machine, called the "Clean Pitter," was all stainless steel, non-lubricated, and designed to be easy to clean. He e-mail is: andersondm@aol.com