Design for Manufacturing and Assembly Rules and Guidelines for Engineering

Companies’ competitiveness can be improved either by optimizing production processes or by developing a product and components to fit better to existing production processes. The latter is sought by designing a product so that previously encountered production and manufacturability anomalies can be avoided. Various Design for Manufacturing and Assembly, DFMA, -methods are developed to design better and more easily manufacturable products. DFMA methods are used to simplify the product structure, to reduce manufacturing and assembly costs, and to analyse and identify improvement targets. DFMA has evolved over time to become a philosophy of optimizing the total product from the standpoint of assembly, part design and total life cycle cost. The practice of applying DFMA is to identify, quantify and eliminate waste or inefficiency in a product design. Early consideration of manufacturing issues shortens overall product development time, minimizes development costs, and ensures a smooth transition into production. Thesis was written in cooperation with Sandvik Mining and Construction. The thesis project was initiated because variable rules and guidelines to aid manufacturing and assembly existed in different production and development units at the company. There was no common practice in utilising DFMA for designing and engineering. As a result, it was seen that general guidelines to harmonize design practices were needed. Accordingly, the objective of the thesis was to create and initiate a first version of a common DFMA rules and guidelines for the company. Work was conducted in collaboration with three main Product Development Centers, Tampere (Finland), Turku (Finland) and Zeltweg (Austria). Company offers a wide range of products and thereby rules and guidelines were designed to consist of both generic and product specific sections. Furthermore, design instructions were divided into concept and detail design sections to efficiently support product designing and to emphasise the importance of early design decisions. The DFMA rules and guidelines aim to compile and share best design practices among different Product Development Centers in order to harmonize product designing. Moreover, DFMA seeks to enhance collaboration practices between design and production departments to enable better product design. /Kir1