See articles about the only way to Exceed Cost Goals in Half the Time
and the only web articles about product families , Commercializatio and Scalability

Needed now: Design to scale up millions When Needed
without supply shortages or production bottle-necks
If this is busy, go to http://www.build-to-order-consulting.com/scslsbility.htm
If that is busy go to: http://halfcostproducts.com/Scalability.htm

Since this is the worst possible time to "fire-fight" production or ramp problems
"on the floor," companies should design product for manufacturability,
which can be done in remote teams, using Zoom or M.S. Team.

If this is not widely understood, implement DFM (below) and
arrange DFM webinar training or
distribute the 600 page 2020 DFM book.

Design for Manufacturability Implementation

This page will show you how to exceed cost goals in half the time by design.

Initial Steps

C Read the articles on this site 53 of which are grouped by categories in the home page and listed alphabetically on the articles page.

C Recommend appropriate articles to others

C Print relevant articles and distribute them to others internally with the source cited.

C Contact Dr. Anderson, by calling or filling out the form below, to discuss the opportunities; there is no charge for this dialog.

Next Steps

C Read the 3030 DFM book "Design for Manufacturability: How to Use Concurrent Engineering to Rapidly Develop Low-Cost, High-Quality Products for Lean Production," (486 pages, Productivity Press)

C Meet with like-minded people to discuss the opportunities. Set up a conference call with Dr. Anderson to discuss the opportunities interactively; again there is no charge for this discussion.

C Use information from articles, books, and discussions to make presentations to raise awareness and start initiations to improve manufacturability, cost, time, quality, and all the other improvements this site shows how to do.

Research (these steps can be done before or after DFM training)

C Identify relevant goals, such as all costs, time to stable production, time to order fulfillment, and the speed to innovation.

C Ascertain how well is the company meeting its goals and customer expectations.

C Look up facts that will indicate the need for DFM and eventually "sell the program," for instance, the true time-to-market as measured to stable production, time to introduce into production, the number of change orders per year, the yearly change order budget, resource drains, quality degradation, from cost reduction attempts after design, which are delineated in the article "7Reasons Why Cost Reduction After Design Doesn't Work."

C Ask Manufacturing about challenges building products with respect to manufacturability shortcomings. Collect a few examples of how better DFM could improved manufacturability with high-profile "poster boy" consequences that made it high enough to spur action.

C Add this data to discussions and presentations

Design for Manufacturability TRAINING

Companies need to provide DFM training because DFM is only taught in a few colleges. Engineers are almost exclusively taught to design for functionality. Further, engineering tools primarily help engineers design for functionality. And years of work may have turned this focus into a habit.

So product designers need to be taught to design for manufacturability. Further, besides the obvious learning benefits, offering DFM training can be a catalyst to change behavior. Many companies use DFM training to kick off DFM programs.

How to be taught the most practical DFM principles

Dr. Anderson's DFM class is the most effective and practical class available because:

He has personally taught 30 years of classes and customized all of those based on surveys, interviews, plant tours, and research.
Workshops are based on a decade of being a project leader, in most of which he personally build what he designed in his own machine shop.

Teaching design guidelines is hard to do without many visual examples. The four hour section on DFM and Design for Quality have 600 PowerPoint slides, with 130 slides available for special needs.

So the this is the best DFM course out there and is far better than the usual "canned material taught by staff trainers" who only teach engineers guidelines, sometimes using tools that may use software that look for “opportunities” after something is designed, which is discouraged, as shown in the articles “Why it is so hard to reduce cost or "implement" DFM after design” at http://www.halfcostproducts.com/how_not_to_lower_cost.htm and “7 Reasons Why “Cost Reduction” Attempts after Design Doesn’t Work;' at: http://design4manufacturability.com/cost_redu ction.htm

C Call Dr. Anderson to discuss your training needs. His seminar is described on the DFM seminar page and on the page describing his new DFM webinar, which costs a third less, has no class limit, and is easier to arrange.

Product-Specific Workshop

C Schedule product specific workshops to apply DFM principles to specific products. Dr. Anderson would be the facilitator and lead the product development team through a series of planned brainstorming sessions to show the team how to implement the principles of the seminar. This is a effective way to get a new product development project "off on the right foot" and help the team optimize product architecture to design in manufacturability, low-cost, modularity, quality, and reliability.

C Have Dr. Anderson work with teams in an on-going consulting role.

Customize DFM Training and Workshops to Products

DFM training must be customized for the company’s products, operations, and culture, taking into account how much positive progress has been made and how much counter-productive "progress" has been made as itemized in the article on counter-productive policies and steps that should be avoided. On the home page, the grabber for this article is "Why Companies Can't Innovate and how to unleash innovation."

Although any motivated group could sponsor and arrange the training, the training itself should be given for all relevant functions and departments and corporate leadership.

Schedule DFM training for all product development personnel in DFM principles. Design for Manufacturability training should be customized to the company’s product line and culture. Beware of bringing in training that is based only on generic principle or an "canned" presentations just read by staff trainers; s easy way to spot inflexible canned presentations is if they have been given a trendy name or called a "tool." or worse, if the name has been trademarked. Don’t limit training to only procedures or project management techniques. Be suspicious of "training" that may really be trying to sell software.

Ask prospective trainers how much they will be customizing the material, on what will they will base such customization (like surveys or interviews), and how much relevant experience the actual presenter has with your type of products – not just having similar products on the client list of the training company. Beware of high-powered sales presentations by experience people, who will send less experienced people to do the actual training.

Don't Do DFM Training "On the Cheap": See the article How Not to Do Training.

Trainer Qualifications

Design for Manufacturability training should be presented by someone thoroughly familiar with DFM principles and with enough experience to answer questions and engage the audience in discussions on how to apply these principles in your company and how other companies did. Experience in both design and manufacture will enable the trainer to talk from the perspective of designers (with personal design examples) and manufacturing (relating personal experiences with manufacturable and unmanufacturable designs).

DFM training by in-house personnel is a possibility, but only if the trainer thoroughly understands all the DFM principles and has enough experience and facilitation skills to answer questions, encourage discussions, and convey all the important principles. With in-house trainers, position and title can be an asset or a liability. DFM training from manufacturing people might appear to be "preachy," whereas training from design people might not fully understand manufacturability issues. Senior managers would carry more authority than "worker bees," but usually senior managers don’t have the time or bandwidth to adequately prepare and present the training. Further, inside trainers may not have as much credibility as "outside experts." In fact, a common experience of outside trainers is the appreciation from insiders who have been trying to improve the situation for years, but with little success, because they lack the outside expert’s credibility and experience.

Design for Manufacturability Training Agenda

An excellent way to kick off a DFM seminar or webinar is start with some rousing opening comments by the President, Vice President of Engineering, or division General Manager. These comments are important to convey management support and motivate everyone to learn the principles and then be expected to put them into practice. Motivation emphases can range from stressing opportunities to "we gotta do this for survival."

One President kicked off a DFM seminar relating the experience when they shipped a million dollar processing machine to a semiconductor fabrication plant and no one could understand why it wouldn’t work, until they figured out that a light-sensitive enclosure was not sealed properly because someone grabbed too long a screw from a proliferated selection.

The kick off executive should also introduce the trainer along with a brief bio-sketch and then hopefully stay for at least the high-level topics, which roughly correspond to the first four chapters of this book.

An effective opening topic is to review and discuss the results of pre-class surveys which rank the class topics according to which need the most work. Interestingly, the topic needing the most work in over half the companies polled is Prioritization.

the survey, described above, which says in the attendees own words what is wrong with the current product development culture and what are the opportunities for improvement.

The recommended training order is to start with "the big picture" topics so that senior managers can attend the first morning session, which focuses on the importance and implementation of the following (references refer to Chapters and Sections in the book "Design for Manufacturability & Concurrent Engineering"). Key topics include"

C Product line planning, prioritizing, and rationalization (Section 2.10). Planning nees the most frequently updated page on on this site; which is on on Strategy.

C Thorough optimization of the crucial concept/architecture stage, which determines 60% of a products cumulative lifetime cost (Sections 1.4, 3.6, and 3.7)

C Cutting the time to stable production in half thorough up-front optimization and design work (Sections 3.6 and 3.7)

C Resource availability to ensure the formation of compete teams with all specializations active early (Sections 2..8, 2.9, and 3.1)

C Preselection of vendor/partners who can help develop products (Section 3.1)

C An effective, empowered team leader (Section 2.4 - 2.5)

C Ensuring teams have the proper focus (Section 2.6).

C Raising and resolving issues early (Section 2.7, Phase III)

C Minimizing all types of risk (Section 1.9)

C Decision making, costing, product pricing, and performance measures based on total cost accounting (Chapter 7)

The remaining sessions should teach the following to engineers and managers:

C Motivation and overcoming resistance for DFM (Sections 1.2, 1.3, and 11.1)

C Understanding manufacturing through experience and teamwork (Section 3.15)

C Optimizing product design by satisfying all design considerations (Section 3.1)

C Avoiding arbitrary decisions (Section 3.4)

C Creative product development (Section 3.11) and brainstorming (Section 3.12)

C Do it right the first time (Sections 1.10 - 1.11) to minimize the costs and delays of changes (Section 6.6)

C Considering off-the-shelf parts early (Section 5.19)

C Designing around standard parts (Chapter 5)

C Designing for lean, build-to-order, and mass customization (Chapter 4)

C Follow appropriate design guidelines for products (Chapter 8) and parts (Chapter 9)

C Design in quality and reliability (Chapter 10) to eliminate the cost of quality (Section 6.9)

C Total cost minimization (Chapter 6) and a new methodologies that show how cut 9 categories of cost by 1/2 to 1/10 of the usual cost!

C Change (Section 11.1)

C DFM implementation (Chapter 11)

C The importance and benefits of DFM (Sections 1.13 and 12.9)

"What Applies the Most from the Class?"

As a last event in the training, poll the audience and ask "What should happen next?" The answers can be very helpful for formulating implementation strategies. For example, after in-house DFM seminars, the author writes all the answers on several flip charts, draws a line between each response, and then has the audience vote what they think is the most important. The easiest way to arrange for voting is to issue each attendee eight votes, in the form of round sticky-back dots, which everyone can affix to the zones for each point (the rules are only one vote per point). Experience has shown that this is an invigorating way to wrap up the seminar, since most people hang around to see the voting results unfold. The DFM "champion" should then prioritize the results and distribute to all attendees, management, and any DFM task forces.

DFM Training Attendance

Attendance for DFM training should include everyone involved in product development so training is not just be "preaching to the choir" of manufacturing engineers or "DFM engineers" who, after training, would attend design team meetings in the hopes of steering the team to more manufacturable designs. That goes against the main principle of this book, which is that DFM is designed into the product by the entire team. Thus, all team members need to be trained in DFM.

Nor should DFM training be limited to engineers. Managers should attend with the engineers. Senior manages should either attend an "executive education" session or attend the first day of the seminar, which focuses on higher-level topics. Lack of management attendance has two negative consequences: management doesn’t learn their critical role in assuring DFM success (Section 12.7, I); worse, attendees interpret lack of attendance as lack of management support. When Freudenberg-NOK implemented lean production, Joseph Day, Chairman and CEO, said, "We required our executives to be participants in the first wave in training."

DFM training benefits from a diverse audience, beyond the usual design engineers and manufacturing engineers, so include purchasing agents, materials managers, vendors, and key people from Quality, Field Service, and so forth.

From Chapter 11 of the DFM book, 2014 by Dr. David M. Anderson

To enquire about public and in-house DFM seminars and webinars, fill out the form.

Call Dr. Anderson at 1-805-924-0100 (Pacific time zone) to discuss implementing these techniques or e-mail him at anderson@build-to-order-consulting.com with your name, title, company, phone, types of products, and needs/opportunities.

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