The Development and Use of a Software Tool for Selecting Manufacturing Process at Early

Choosing the right manufacturing process for making a component is an important consideration at the early stages of design. Frequently, the choice of process is based on previous experience or tradition, thereby missing the opportunity to use a new or more suitable process. Lost opportunities could be avoided if the designer had access to a quick efficient selection tool that would guide the selection. In this paper, a systematic procedure for selecting the optimum process to manufacture a component is described. It is based on comparing the attributes required by the design (required material, size, shape, etc.) with those that lie within the capacity of a large number of processes, seeking the subset which is capable of making the component. The subset is then ranked by economic criteria. To do this, a database containing data on 125 processes was created. The Cambridge Materials Selector (CMS) software is used as the user-interface. The capabilities and limitations of the Processes Database and the Selection Methodology are described and documented through two case studies. The software is used to suggest a process by which each of two diverse components might be shaped, and the suggestions are compared with the known way in which the component was, in practice, made.