Shipulski On Design

Posts Tagged ‘Engage Design; Product Design; Cost Savings’

There’s an unnatural attraction to lean – a methodology to change the value stream to reduce waste.  And it’s the same with Design for Manufacturing (DFM) – a methodology to design out cost of your piece-parts. The real rain maker is Design for Assembly (DFA) which eliminates parts altogether (50% reductions are commonplace.) DFA is far more powerful.

The cost for a designed out part is zero.  Floor space for a designed out part is zero. Transportation cost for a designed out part is zero. (Can you say Green?) From a lean perspective, for a designed out part there is zero waste.  For a designed out part the seven wastes do not apply.

Here’s a recipe for unreasonable profits:

Design out half the parts with DFA.  For the ones that remain, choose the three highest cost parts and design out the cost.  Then, and only then, do lean on the manufacturing processes.

For a video version of the post, see this link: (Video embedded below.)

A Recipe for Unreasonable Profits.

I wrote an article on the level of savings when product designers are engaged in DFMA. 

Here is an excerpt:

 This month, Shipulski details the company’s lean product-design efforts as he issues a “call to action” for lean manufacturers everywhere to involve their product-design teams. 

Why should the manufacturing engineering community care about engaging the product design community in pursuits such as design for manufacturing (DFM) and design for assembly (DFM)? The answer is simple—to make (and save) money