Kaizen

Running Head: DESIGN FOR MANUFACTURING 1

DESIGN FOR MANUFACTURING 4

Design for Manufacturing

AbdulHameed Alalwani

IE590

HW2

Part1

Design for Manufacturing

Manufacturing companies have been faced with numerous challenges over the recent years. As competition gets more fierce, manufacturing firms have continually developed new products to enable them increase their customer base. Consequently, these companies have utilized strategies like Design for Manufacturing and Design for Assembly to enable a product design to be efficiently manufactured and easily assembled with minimum labor cost. Focusing on the article ‘Design for Manufacturing (DFM) approach for Productivity Improvement in Medical Equipment Manufacturing’, certain problems and goals have been identified in relation to using DSM. Owing to the issue of improving an Electrocardiograph (ECG) model referred to as ―CARDIART 108T DIGI‖, a manufacturing firm identified a number of problems. They included, high manufacturing cost, obsolete tools and associated quality issues as well as low productivity of the medical equipment. Therefore, the firm aimed at ensuring high quality alongside increasing the number of units sold while minimizing the manufacturing cost (Prasad, Zacharia & Babu, 2008).

In this light, the firm applied a series of steps to help solve the problems highlighted. The first approach taken laid emphasis on curtailing the costs related to the components and assembly. To modify the design of CARDIART 108T DIGI, the company redesigned the components to reduce the processing steps. For instance, instead of using an aluminium casting for the top and bottom panel, the redesign would change it to plastic molded (ABS) cabinet (Prasad, Zacharia & Babu, 2008). Integration of components would equally suffice as a measure of addressing the cost of assembly. Furthermore, the integration of several geometric features would significantly reduce the need to separate processing operations for individual components (Prasad, Zacharia & Babu, 2008). It was also necessary to standardize components through elimination of custom made parts. In addition, to develop an intuition for the drive behind the cost of assembly, evaluation of the assembly efficiency is inevitable. The expression of the design for assembly index is (Theoretical minimum number of parts) × (3 Seconds) / Estimated total assembly time (Prasad, Zacharia & Babu, 2008). Upon comparing the DFA index before and after the modification of the design points to an improvement in the assembly efficiency.

Overall, several lessons can be learnt from the DFM for the Electrocardiograph (ECG) model. Besides the component cost reduction realized from the process, DFM also help in achieving the manufacturing cost reduction. This is attained through the deletion of components in the old design while also integrating other components in the modified design. DFM is instrumental in reducing the production time after implementation of certain modifications. For example, there was a considerable reduction on the time taken for bottleneck processes such as casting and machining after the design modification. Time taken for the production time lead reduced from 2 weeks to 1 week (Prasad, Zacharia & Babu, 2008). The improved version of the medical equipment managed to execute mass orders of between 1000 to 1500 units per month without any additional investments within the manufacturing or assembly line (Prasad, Zacharia & Babu, 2008). Furthermore, DFM provided a promise on the return of investment just within a year. Issues related to the quality of the products such as breakages in castings were also addressed. Going forward, it is clear that DFM can serve as an efficient approach for process improvement, especially in the manufacturing sector through reducing complexity and costs incurred in the early stages.

Reference

Prasad, S., Zacharia, T., & Babu, J. (2008). Design for Manufacturing (DFM) approach for Productivity Improvement in Medical Equipment Manufacturing. Inernational Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering, 4(4), 79-85.