Design for Manufacture

Designing a product for manufacture is a complicated set of activities that must take into account all business and manufacturing goals for a technology. Whether it’s component design or selection, identifying manufacturing processes, or programming language and operating system, the activity of Design for Manufacture (DFM) must align with company positioning and cost targets. Potential manufacturing vendors should be consulted to ensure that processes, capabilities, capacity, and costs match expectations and that pitfalls can be avoided during the transfer to manufacturing.

If the concept is not aligned with the company or manufacturer, DFM allows time for change prior to resource intensive product development or prototyping occurring.  This reduces costs and increases iterations to identify the most efficient design to satisfy market requirements.

Where and by whom the technology will be manufactured must be decided. The development team(s) should carefully scrutinize all aspects of the design to ensure that it satisfies all requirements in the MRD and PRD.

In this module, the focus is all about making sure the design is something that manufacturing can actually produce.

• Ensure components and assemblies are able to be manufactured
• Production capacity and output are aligned with sales targets
• Cost reduction and process improvement strategies
• Contact potential manufacturing vendors to ensure that processes, capabilities, capacity, and costs match expectations