Shipulski On Design

Posts Tagged ‘Fix Manufacturing’

An amazing article by Andy Grove, co-founder of Intel, that puts things in perspective.  A country’s economy must be based on manufacturing and the jobs it creates.  It’s not about the designing and developing.  It’s about the manufacturing (and the jobs).  End of story.

This one’s worth the read.

Link to complete article

Please pass this one around.

For too long we have praised financial enterprises for driving economic growth knowing full well that moving and repackaging financial vehicles does not create value and cannot provide sustainable growth. All the while, manufacturing as taken it on the chin with astronomical job losses, the thinnest capital investments and, most troubling, a general denigration of manufacturing as an institution and profession. However, we can get back to basics where sustainable economic growth is founded on the bedrock of value creation through manufacturing.

Continuing with the back-to-basics theme, manufacturing creates value when it combines raw materials and labor with thinking, which we call design, to create a product that sells for more than the cost to make it. The difference between cost (raw materials, labor) and price is profit. The market sets price and volume so manufacturing is left only with materials and labor to influence profit. At the most basic level, manufacturing must reduce materials and labor to increase profit. We can get no more basic than that. How do we use the simple fundamentals of reducing labor and material costs to resurrect U.S. manufacturing? We must change our designs to reduce costs using Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DFMA).

The program is typically thought of as a well-defined toolbox used to design out product cost. However, this definition is too narrow. More broadly, DFMA is a methodology to change a design to reduce the cost of making parts while retaining product function. Systematic DFMA deployment is even broader; it is a business method that puts the business systems and infrastructures to deploy DFMA methods in place systematically across a company. In that way, it is similar to the better known business methodologies lean, Six Sigma and design for Six Sigma.

Click this link for the full story.

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Click this link for information on Mike’s upcoming workshop on Systematic DFMA Deployment

(This post was published as an article.  View the article as a .pdf or .htm.)  Have we read enough, talked enough, circled, and delayed the issue enough to finally do something about the decline in US manufacturing?  Are we afraid enough yet, after each quarterly government trade report, to undertake what is obvious as far as engineering goes? We have the technical know-how in US manufacturing to take away the offshoring advantage of cheap labor.We can design high labor costs out of most products and have elegant assemblies ripple profitably down US manufacturing lines—for export and domestic consumption.

“We have to reassign the product costs mistakenly
placed on manufacturing departments.”

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