Shipulski On Design

Archive for the ‘How To’ Category

Companies (and countries) are slowly learning that moving manufacturing to low cost countries is a big mistake, a mistake of economy-busting proportion. (More costly than any war.) With labor costs at 10% of product cost, saving 20% on labor yields a staggering 2% cost savings. 2%. Say that out loud. 2%. Are you kidding me? 2%? Really? Moving machines all over the planet for 2%? What about cost increases from longer supply chains, poor quality, and loss of control? Move manufacturing to a country with low cost labor? Are you kidding me? Who came up with that idea? Certainly not a knowledgeable manufacturing person. Don’t chase low cost labor, design it out.

(I feel silly writing this. This is so basic.  Blocking-and-tackling. Design 101. But we’ve lost our way, so I will write.)

Use Design for Assembly (DFA) and Design for Manufacturing (DFM) to design out 25-50% of the labor time and make product where you have control. The end. Do it. Do it now. But do it for the right reasons – throughput, and quality.  (And there’s that little thing about radical material cost reduction which yield cost savings of 20+%, but that’s for another time).

The real benefit of labor reduction is not dollars, it’s time. Less time, more throughput. Half the labor time, double the throughput. One factory performs like two. Bring it back. Fill your factories. Repeat the mantra and you’ll bring it back:

Half the labor and one factory performs like two.

QC stands for Quality Control. No control, no quality. Ever try to control things from 10 time zones in the past? It does not work. It has not worked. Bring it back. Bring back your manufacturing to improve quality. Your brand will thank you. Put the C back in QC – bring it back.

Forward this to your highest level Design Leaders. Tell them they can turn things around; tell them they’re the only ones who can pull it off; tell them we need; tell them we’re counting on them; tell them we’ll help; tell them to bring it back.

Cost Out, Cost Down, Cost Reduction, Should Costing – you’ve heard about these programs. But they’re not what they seem. Under the guise of reducing product costs they steal profit margin from suppliers. The customer company increases quarterly profits while the supplier company loses profits and goes bankrupt. I don’t like this. Not only is this irresponsible behavior, it’s bad business. The savings are less than the cost of qualifying a new supplier. Shortsighted. Stupid.

The real way to do it is to design out product cost, to reduce the cost signature. Margin is created and shared with suppliers. Suppliers make more money when it’s done right. That’s right, I said more money. More dollars per part, and not more from the promise of increased sales. (Suppliers know that’s bullshit just as well as you, and you lose credibility when you use that line.) The Design Engineering community are the only folks that can pull this off.

Only the Design Engineers can eliminate features that create cost while retaining features that control function. More function, less cost. More margin for all. The trick: how to get Design Engineers involved.

There is a belief that Design Engineers want nothing to do with cost. Not true. Design Engineers would love to design out cost, but our organization doesn’t let us, nor do they expect us to. Too busy; too many products to launch; designing out cost takes too long. Too busy to save 25% of your material cost? Really? Run the numbers – material cost times volume times 25%. Takes too long? No, it’s actually faster. Manufacturing issues are designed out so the product hits the floor in full stride so Design Engineers can actually move onto designing the next product. (No one believes this.)

Truth is Design Engineers would love to design products with low cost signatures, but we don’t know how. It’s not that it’s difficult, it’s that no one ever taught us. What the Design Engineers need is an investment in the four Ts – tools, training, time,  and a teacher.

Run the numbers.  It’s worth the investment.

Material cost x Volume x 25%

I read a refreshing article in the Washington Post. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates wants to save $20B per year on the Pentagon’s spend. I could kiss this guy!

Gates wants contracts scrutinized more closely for inefficiencies and unneeded overhead. He said the savings could be shifted to support U.S. troops around the globe. Pentagon officials said they’re looking for annual savings in the $400 billion spent on goods and services. They’re looking to save $20B, or 5%.

Gates has it right. The government must stop overpaying. But how? Gates suggests improved contract scrutiny to eliminate inefficiencies and unneeded overhead. He’s on the right track, but that’s not where the money is. Gates’ real target should be material cost – that’s where the money is. But, can material cost bring $20B savings? Yes.

Assume the Pentagon spends $100B on services and $300B on goods. The cost of those of goods falls into three buckets: labor, material, and overhead, where material cost makes up the lion’s share at 70%, or $210B. A 10% reduction in material cost brings $21B in savings, and gets Gates to his target. But how?

To get the savings, the Pentagon must drive the right behavior.  They must must make suppliers submit a “should cost” with all proposals. The should cost is an estimated cost based on part geometries, materials, manufacturing processes used to create the parts, prevailing wage rates and machine rates, and profit. From these parameters, a should cost can be created in the design phase, without actually making the parts. So, the Pentagon will know what they should pay before the product is made. This cost analysis is based on real data, real machines, and real material costs.  There is no escape for defense contractors.  The cash cow is no longer.

Should costing will drive the design engineers to create designs that work better and cost less, something the defense industry thinks is impossible. They’re wrong. Given the tools, time, and training, the defense industry’s design engineering community can design out at least 25% of material cost, resulting in $50B+ in savings, more than twice Gates’ goal. Someone just has to teach them how.

Mr. Secretary, the non-defense world is ready to help.  Just ask us. (But we’ll go after a 50% cost reduction.)

About eight years ago, Hypertherm embarked on a mission to revamp the way it designed products. Despite the fact its plasma metal-cutting technology was highly regarded and the market leader in the field, the internal consensus was that product complexity could be reduced and thus made more consistently reliable, and there was an across-the-board campaign to reduce product development and manufacturing costs. Instead of entailing novel engineering tactics or state-of-the-art process change, it was a back-to-basics strategy around design for manufacture and assembly (DFMA) that propelled Hypertherm to meet its goals.

The first step in the redesign program was determining what needed to change. A steering committee with representation from engineering, manufacturing, marketing, and business leadership spent weeks trying to determine what was required from a product standpoint to deliver radical improvements in both product performance and product economics. As a result of that collaboration, the team established aggressive new targets around robustness and reliability in addition to the goal of cutting the parts count and labor costs nearly in half.

See link for entire article

By reducing parts count and easing assembly, one plasma cutter maker explores customized manufacturing.

By Jean Thilmany, Associate Editor, Mechanical Engineering Magazine

Ask nearly any engineer or manufacturer about customized manufacturing and—to a person—they’ll all say the same thing: Have you heard the Dell story?

Dell is offered up again and again as the number one example of customized manufacturing done right and done successfully. Shortly after its founding in 1984, Dell began what it calls a configure-to-order approach to manufacturing. The computer company lets customers customize their own computers on the Dell Web site. Buyers select how much memory and disk space they desire and the resulting computer is manufactured and shipped to them.

The approach has helped the computer maker see skyrocket growth. Last year, it held the second-highest spot for desktops and laptops shipped, behind Hewlett Packard, according to market-share numbers from research firm International Data Corp. in Framingham, Mass.

Manufacturers—particularly electronics manufacturers—have long been taking notice. Many of them are investigating how the configure-to-order model could be put to use at their own companies. And some of them have implemented the method—along with the necessary software to get the job done—with great success.

Take Hypertherm Inc. of Hanover, N.H., maker of plasma metal cutting equipment. The company has recently started allowing customers to choose online from ten CNC Edge Pro product configurations, up from three configurations in the former product line, said John Sobr, head designer on the project.

Hypertherm recently redesigned its plasma metal cutting equipment to reduce part count by 27 percent while doubling the number of inputs available. Customers can now choose from ten product configurations.

Link to full article

Ask a company or team to do DFMA, and you get a great list of excuses on why DFMA is not applicable and won’t work. Product volumes are too low for DFMA, or too high; product costs are too low, or too high; production processes are too simple, or complex; production mix is too low, or too high.  That’s all crap – just excuses to get out of doing the work.  DFMA is applicable; it’s just a question of how to prioritize the work.

To prioritize the work, take a look at product volumes.  They’ll put you in the right ballpark. Here are three categories, low, medium, and high volume:

a Read the rest of this entry »

Axiom 1 – Time is short, so make sure you’re working on the most important stuff.

Axiom 2 – You can’t design out what you can’t see.

In product development, these two axioms can keep you out of trouble. They’re two sides of the same coin, but I’ll describe them one at a time and hope it comes together in the end.

With Axiom 1, how do you make sure you’re working on the most important stuff? We all know it’s function first – no learning there. But, sorry design engineers, it doesn’t end with function. You must also design for lean, for cost, and factory floor space. Great. More things to design for. Didn’t you say time was short? How the hell am I going to design for all that?

Now onto the seeing business of Axiom 2. If we agree that lean, cost, and factory floor space are the right stuff, we must “see it” if we are to design it out. See lean? See cost? See factory floor space? You’re nuts.  How do you expect us to do that?

Pareto to the rescue – use Pareto charts to identify the most important stuff, to prioritize the work. With Pareto, it’s simple: work on the biggest bars at the expense of the smaller ones. But, Paretos of what?

There is no such thing as a clean sheet design – all new product designs have a lineage. A new design is based on an existing design, a baseline design, with improvements made in several areas to realize more features or better function defined by the product specification. The Pareto charts are created from the baseline design to allow you to see the things  to design out (Axiom 2). But what lenses to use to see lean, cost, and factory floor space?

Here are Pareto’s three lenses so see what must be seen:

To lean out lean out your factory, design out the parts. Parts create waste and part count is the surrogate for lean.

To design out cost, measure cost. Cost is the surrogate for cost.

To design out factory floor space, measure assembly time. Since factory floor space scales with assembly time, assembly time is the surrogate for factory floor space.

Now that your design engineers have created the right Pareto charts and can see with the right glasses, they’re ready to focus their efforts on the most important stuff. No boiling the ocean here. For lean, focus on part count of subassembly 1; for cost, focus on the cost of subassemblies 2 and 4; for floor space, focus on assembly time of subassembly 5. Leave the others alone.

Focus is important and difficult, but Pareto can help you see the light.

Monday, June 14th, 2010
1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Pre‐Conference Workshop

2010 INTERNATIONAL FORUM on Design for Manufacturing and Assembly
Providence, Rhode Island, USA

Systematic DFMA Deployment
Real‐World Implementation and Hard Savings Make the Difference

Systematic DMFA Deployment is a straightforward, logical method to design out product cost and design in product function. Whether you want to learn about DFMA, execute a single project, implement across the company, or convince company leaders of DFMA benefits, this workshop is for you.

Systematic DMFA Deployment workshop attendees will learn how to:

• Select and manage projects
• Define resources and quantify savings
• Communicate benefits to company leadership
• Coordinate with lean and Six Sigma
• Get more out of DFMA software

Once you understand the principles of the Systematic DFMA Deployment milestone‐based system, you
will focus on activities that actually reduce product cost and avoid wheel‐spinning activities that create
distraction.

Workshop Fee: $95

Presenter
Dr. Mike Shipulski
For the past six years as Director of Engineering at Hypertherm, Inc., Mike has had the responsibilities of product development, technology development, sustaining engineering, engineering talent development, engineering labs, and intellectual property. Before Hypertherm, Mike worked in a manufacturing start‐up as the Director of Manufacturing and at General Electric’s R&D center as a Manufacturing Scientist during the start‐up phase of GE’s Six Sigma efforts. Mike received a Ph.D. in Manufacturing Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Mike is the winner of the 2006 DFMA Supporter of the Year, and has been a keynote presenter at the DFMA Forum since 2006.

Whether inventing new technologies, designing new products, or solving manufacturing problems, it’s important to understand assumptions. Assumptions shape the technical approach and focus thinking on what is considered (assumed) most important. Blindness to assumptions is all around us and is a real reason for concern.  And the kicker, the most dangerous ones are also the most difficult to see – your own assumptions. What techniques or processes can we use to ferret out our own implicit assumptions?

By definition, implicit assumptions are made without formalization, they’re not explicit. Unknowingly, fertile design space can be walled off. Like the archeologist digging on the wrong side of they pyramid, dig all he wants, he won’t find the treasure because it isn’t there. Also with implicit assumptions, precious time and energy can be wasted solving the wrong problem. Like the auto mechanic who replaced the wrong part, the real problem remains. Both scenarios can create severe consequences for a product development project.  (NOTE: the notion of implicit assumptions is closely related to the notion of intellectual  inertia.  See Categories – Intellectual Inertia for a detailed treatment.)

Now the tough part. How to identify your own implicit assumptions? When at their best, the halves of our brains play nicely together, but never does either side rise to the level of omnipotence. It’s impossible to stand outside ourselves and watch us make implicit assumptions. We don’t work that way. We need some techniques.

Narrow, narrow, narrow. The probability of making implicit assumptions decreases when the conflict domain is narrowed.

Narrow in space and time to make the conflict domain small and assumptions are reduced.

Narrow the conflict domain in space – narrow to two elements of the design that aren’t getting along. Not three elements – that’s one too many, but two. Narrow further and make sure the two conflicting elements are in direct physical contact, with nothing in between. Narrow further and define where they touch. Get small, really small, so small the direct contact is all you see. Narrowing in space reduces space-based assumptions.

Narrow the conflict domain in time – break it into three time domains: pre-conflict time, conflict time, post-conflict time. This is a foreign idea, but a powerful one. Solutions are different in the three time domains. The conflict can be prevented before it happens in the pre-conflict time, conflict can be dealt with while it’s happening (usually a short time) in the conflict time, and ramifications of the conflict can be cleaned up in the post-conflict time. Narrowing in time reduces time-based assumptions.

Assumptions narrow even further when the conflict domain is narrowed in time and space together, limiting them to the where and when of the conflict. Like the intersection of two overlapping circles, the conflict domain is sharply narrowed at the intersection of space and time – a small space over a short time.

It’s best to create a picture of the conflict domain to understand it in space and time. Below (click to enlarge) is an example where abrasives (brown) in a stream of water (light blue) flow through a hole in a metal plate (gray) creating wear of the sidewall (in red). Pre-conflict time is before the abrasive particles enter the hole from the top; conflict time is while the particles contact the sidewall (conflict domain in red); post-conflict time is after the particles leave the hole. Only the right side of the metal place is shown to focus on the conflict domain. There is no conflict where the abrasive particles do not touch the sidewall.

Even if your radar is up and running, assumptions are tough to see – they’re translucent at best. But the techniques can help, though they’re difficult and uncomfortable, especially at first.  But that’s the point.  The techniques force you to argue with yourself over what you know and what you think you know.  For a good start, try identify the two elements of the design that are not getting along, and make sure they’re in direct physical contact. If you’re looking for more of a challenge, try to draw a picture of the conflict domain. Your assumptions don’t stand a chance.

Your best engineer walks into your office and says, “I have this idea for a new technology that could revolutionize our industry and create new markets, markets three times the size of our existing ones.” What do you do? What if, instead, it’s a lower caliber engineer that walks into your office and says those same words? Would you do anything differently? I argue you would, even though you had not heard the details in either instance. I think you’d take your best engineer at her word and let her run with it. And, I think you’d put less stock in your lesser engineer, and throw some roadblocks in the way, even though he used the same words. Why? Trust.

Innovation is largely a trust-based sport. We roll the dice on folks that have already put it on the table, and, conversely, we raise the bar on those that have not yet delivered – they have not yet earned our trust. Seems rational and reasonable – trust those who have earned it. But how did they earn your trust the first time, before they delivered? Trust.

There is no place for trust in the sport of innovation. It’s unhealthy. Ronald Reagan had it right:

Trust, but verify.

As we know, he really meant there was no place for trust in his kind of sport. Every action, every statement had to be verified. The consequences so cataclysmic, no risk could be tolerated. With innovation consequences are not as severe, but they are still substantial. A three year, multi-million (billion?) dollar innovation project that returns nothing is substantial. Why do we tolerate the risk that comes with our trust-based approach? I think it’s because we don’t think there’s a better way. But there is. What we need is some good, old-fashioned verification mixed in with our innovation.

When the engineer comes into your office and says she can reinvent your industry, what do you ask yourself? What do you want to verify? You want to know if the new idea is worth a damn, if it will work, if there are fundamental constraints in the way. But, unfortunately for you, verification requires  knowledge of the physics, and you’re no physicist. However, don’t lose hope. There are two simple tactics, non-technical tactics, to help with this verification business.

First – ask the engineers a simple question, “What conflict is eliminated with the new technology?” Good, innovative technologies eliminate fundamental, long standing conflicts. These long standing conflicts limit a technology in a way that is so fundamental engineers don’t even know they exist. When a fundamental conflict is eliminated, long held “design tradeoffs” no longer apply, and optimizing is replaced by maximizing. With optimizing, one aspect of the design is improved at the expense of another. With maximizing, both aspects of the design are improved without compromise. If the engineers cannot tell you about the conflict they’ve eliminated, your trust has not been sufficiently verified. Ask them to come back when they can answer your question.

Second – when they come back with their answer, it will be too complex to be understood, even by them. Tell them to come back when they can describe the conflict on a single page using a simple block diagram, where the blocks, labeled with everyday nouns, represent parts of the design intimately involved with the conflict, and the lines, labeled with everyday verbs, represent actions intimately involved with the conflict. If they can create a block diagram of the conflict, and it makes sense to you, your trust has been sufficiently verified. (For a post with a more detailed description of the block diagrams, click on “one page thinking” in the Category list.)

Though your engineers won’t like it at first, your two-pronged verification tactics will help them raise their game, which, in turn, will improve the risk/reward ratio of your innovation work.

Everyone wants growth – but how? We know innovation is a key to growth, but how do we do it? Be creative, break the rules, think out of the box, think real hard, innovate. Those words don’t help me. What do I do differently after hearing them?

I am a process person, processes help me. Why not use a process to improve innovation? Try this: set up a meeting with your best innovators and use “process” and “innovation” in the same sentence. They’ll laugh you off as someone that doesn’t know the front of a cat from the back. Take your time to regroup after their snide comments and go back to your innovators.  This time tell them how manufacturing has greatly improved productivity and quality using formalized processes. List them – lean, Six Sigma, DFSS, and DFMA. I’m sure they’ll recognize some of the letters. Now tell them you think a formalized process can improve innovation productivity and quality. After the vapor lock and brain cramp subsides, tell them there is a proven process for improved innovation.

A process for innovation? Is this guy for real? Innovation cannot be taught or represented by a process. Innovation requires individuality of thinking. It’s a given right of innovators to approach it as they wish, kind of  like freedom of speech where any encroachment on freedom is a slippery slope to censorship and stifled thinking. A process restricts, it standardizes, it squeezes out creativity and reduces individual self worth. People are either born with the capability to innovate, or they are not. While I agree that some are better than others at creating new ideas, innovation does not have to be governed by hunch, experience and trial and error. Innovation does not have to be like buying lottery tickets. I have personal experience using a good process to help stack the odds in my favor and help me do better innovation.  One important function of the innovation process is to break intellectual inertia.

Intellectual inertia must be overcome if real, meaningful innovation is to come about. When intellectual inertia reigns, yesterday’s thinking carries the day.  Yesterday’s thinking has the momentum of a steam train puffing and bellowing down the tracks. This old train of thought can only follow a single path – the worn tracks of yesteryear, and few things are powerful enough to derail it. To misquote Einstein:

The thinking that got us into this mess is not the thinking that gets us out of it.

The notion of intellectual inertia is the opposite of  Einstein’s thinking. The intellectual inertia mantra: the thinking that worked before is the thinking that will work again.  But how to break the inertia? Read the rest of this entry »