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It is Time to Learn
New Ways* to Design & Build
and Stop
doing what gets in the Way!
* The 590 page
2020 DFM book has 814 topic section
TIME TO INNOVATE
 As
Dr. Anderson’s classes and DFM
books emphasize thorough “Concept/Architecture” work in Figure 3-1, (in the
green bands shown at the right), which cuts in half
the time to stable production. And this is when
60% of cost is determined, providing big cost reduction opportunities, only
on the bottom timeline.
This article will show that having a higher proportion of up-front time will
give you the time to innovate.
This advanced timeline will give you the time to innovate to do the following
things that Dr. Anderson teaches in his classes and workshops:
• Seriously address what innovation was deferred
in previous rushed projects because there just wasn’t enough time for
innovation then or it was tried and wasn’t done right-the-first-time and
fell off the proverbial plate.
• Create innovation for products and innovative processes. His
white paper on concurrently engineering
shows how design innovative products and processes.
• Create concept/architectural
breakthroughs that will
• Leap ahead of all the competition,
instead of wasting valuable resources designing a “me-too” product to fill a
“market gap” and then spend the rest of the product’s life competing on
price and deals. Having time to innovate will enable teams to create
products that customers really want. If this is normally perceived as
"costing more," Dr. Anderson's cost reduction techniques will pay for them
-- and get the innovative products our sooner, on top of that.
• Generate, explore, and refine creative ideas
and then commercialize them for manufacturability, as discussed more
at the end of this article. Even if innovation
was "done" before a new product development project, it still needs to be
commercialized for manufacturability (http://www.halfcostproducts.com/commercialization.htm
)
• Mass Customize
versatile products that can easily accommodate custom orders and
scalable derivatives at no extra cost or time that would result from trying
to modify mass production designs. Further, the mass customization of
flexible processes can programmably offer variety with less cost, time,
space, and weight than modularity that depends on expensive and heavy
interfaces. This is based on Dr. Anderson's experience as Manager of
Flexible Manufacturing at Intel's Systems Group where he designed
flexible fixtures for printed circuit boards. The general principles
of mass customized products/processes are shown in Chapter 8 of his
Mass
Customization book which is summarized on the web article shows flexible processes for electronics
(Figure 1) and flexible processes for fabricated products (Figure 2) at
http://www.build-to-order-consulting.com/mc.htm . Another big
benefit of flexible tooling is that it enables spec changes or
customer-induced changes to be implemented faster than with inflexible
designs built in hard tooling, thus keeping them off the critical
path.
• An example of the value of mass customization is that products could
be offered in any length or capacity, or even above or below the usual
ranges, instead of limiting customers to just a few incremental models.
• Provide
platforms with families of products that can serve a board
range of customers in many markets, niche markets, or small sales that can
be served cost-effectively with engineering and production flexibility.
• Do process innovation that, for proven
or well developed functionality, which can:
• Improve manufacturability, cost, quality, and
cut in half the time to stable production
• Concurrently Engineer
innovative production equipment or tooling to improve all of the above.
This is based on seven years experience at Dr. Anderson's company, Anderson
Automation, Inc., where he designed and personally built special
production machinery
• Redesign conventional subsystems,
for the same functionality, in a way that enables significant savings in
cost, weight, space, or the amount of expensive materials, for instance:
• Electronics. One example would replacing conventional
circuit board “stacks” that connect hundreds plug-in wires with
connectors with flex layers that connect all boards and devices
with systems that reduce cost, quality, space, and weight and, when
unfolded, allow full test coverage while the system is running. The
functional and components would be the same, just less costly, lighter,
and smaller, with better quality. Reliability will improve
exponentially because the number of wire connections removed in the
exponent of quality equations.
• Structures. Rather than basing structures conventional shapes.
Dr. Anderson teaches clients to design structures to match all the
load paths with each element optimized sized to the load on each
path, thus resulting in a structure with the lowest weight, material
usage, cost, and build time. Opportunities include:
• Framework for concentrated loads in which CNC fabricated
trusses following the load paths. Dr. Anderson’s
Weight Reduction Workshop
shows low-cost ways to make truss struts from bar stock or swagged
thick-wall tubing That page shows many generic examples, how to
design them, and discusses many relevant applications, all of which
are all big products with big loads.
• For concentrated and distributed loads. The approach
would again be to start with a load path strategy that would first
connect the concentrated loads together with trusses (as above) and
then distribute them.
And flexible tooling
could minimize weight by mass customizing material thicknesses to
match the loads being distributed as loads fan out to a larger
structure.
Finally, unnecessary concentrated loads should be
avoided, for instance, for outsourcing, tooling limitations, or
modularity used for size/capacity increments that could be replace
by flexible tooling to mass customize integral structures themselves
If the time for innovation is
allocated, major weight and material reductions can be generated in
the concept/architecture, which will avoid “save weight at any cost”
measures where that is the hardest to do.
COMMERCIALIZATION
Commercialization is
part of innovation.
• Ideally, products should commercialized as they are designed,
which is taught in DFM & Concurrent
Engineering classes. And that is most likely to happen if
project timelines provide the time to innovate
• if not, launching un-commercialized products into
production will b e a slow and costly ordeal with
firefighting, change orders, and a draining of resources away from
other projects, as shown in Figure 2-1 (in the
DFM book), which is repeated at this site’s
half-the-time article
• Even if innovation has already been “done” before the project
starts, if the commercialization was not done, the project team will
have to commercialize it during its time to innovate.
The worst commercialize challenges
happen when proof-of-principle designers and champions
are highly motivated to make sure “it works” at any cost. So
they are built by highly skilled technicians (who can make anything
work as a matter or pride), who specify tight-tolerance parts to
ensure a successful demonstration and a prompt go ahead, not to
mention personal kudos for all involved. But then
commercialization efforts face two enormous challenges.
Designed-in tight tolerances,
which will have to be selectively loosened, one by one. If not
done, or the company will "pay the price" every time the product
is built. Fortunately, there is Six Sigma tool that can
methodically specify tolerances: Taguchi MethodsTM
for Robust Design, which is best used in the original design
effort.
Designed-in skill demands for
fabrication and assembly, which may require selective redesign
for manufacturability, or at least skill-reducing fixtures, for
fast and high-quality manufacture in the planned facility
with the planned workforce. Do not assume that skill
demand problems can be automatically remedied, automation,
robotics, or mass production “economies of scale. Those actually
have stricter design rules.
Case study # 1: Effect
of Demonstrations too early
One product development "road
map" advises that for technologies that are not ready for market should be "demonstrated
very quickly
at scale in multiple configurations and in various regional contexts." And
acceleration also "requires a large
increase in investment in demonstration projects.
THe solution from the author's 600 page
book on Design for Manufacturability:
Section 3.2 (Importance of Thorough up-front Work) says: -and this is a
full ver-batim quote:
"Unfortunately,
once the breadboard "works" and is demonstrated to
management or customers—you
guessed it—there is a strong temptation
to "draw it up and get
it into production. The unfortunate result is the company ends up mass producing
breadboards forever! Basing production designs on breadboard architecture misses
the biggest opportunities to make significant reductions in cost and development
time." [end quote]
The book goes on to dite Figures 1-1, 2-1, and 3-1 which both prove
that 60% of cost is determined by the cpmvr[y /
architechure phase and an order magitude more erroft there cuts
the cime-to-stable-production in half!
If the latter makes more sense, than the
former - or if your work is very important,
challenging, or timely - then read the 52 articles
on this site or the all editions or the DFM
book or call Dr. Anderson in
for consulting or seminars.
True innovation must
start with Manufacturable Research
steps
with the entire team practicing Concurrent
Engineering,
Scalability ,
and DFM methodologies from the beginning.
All of these
principles on DFM can be included in
your customized
class and workshop on DFM
or
the
Most Effective
Product Development class
Start an email discussion on Time to Innovate by
phone ot e-mail, fill out this form:
copyright © 2022 by
David M. Anderson
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www.HalfCostProducts.com
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