Design-For-Manufacturing Decision Making

Design-for-manufacturing (DFM) has been promoted as a way to enhance product development and production system performance. Current DFM practices exploit substantial part integration to minimize the materials and labor costs of a product. DFM techniques, however, often lead to long tooling procurement times because of the complexity of the resulting parts. We present a cost model that explicitly includes the economic cost of time. Using this model we show that violating DFM guidelines in order to reduce part complexity can lead to a net improvement in product development and production system performance for high-volume products in time-critical markets. We illustrate how the cost model can be applied in practice by reporting on a field study of design decision making for Polaroid cameras. key words: product design, design for manufacturing, lead time, design decision making, cost modeling for design