The Dispatch provides helpful information to assist you in your engineering and manufacturing journey. For all of us engineers, designers, project managers, and buyers, we can learn to understand DFM (Design for Manufacturing) best practices to leverage lower priced parts to save time and money all around.
In addition, our editorial articles are aimed to empower you in the workplace, to help you become more valuable, and to understand what’s most important from a business perspective so you can negotiate for higher compensation, privileges, advance your career, and advance your lifestyle.
DFM Tenet 1: What is Design For Manufacturability? Creating a design that is extremely simple and cheap to make.
80% of the costs incurred throughout the life of a project happens during production, which is the last phase. However, those costs are dictated by the design concept, engineering, manufacturability, and planning during the first 20% of the project (first phase).
When machine shops see an RFQ for a rectangular part that is 2.03″ thick x 2.1″ wide and volumes are high, eyes roll back in their heads. A top-shelf designer produces part designs with boundary conditions slightly under raw stock material sizes to save significant machine time/cost for production orders; start engineering with the raw material stock size in mind from the beginning.
If volumes are north of 100, 500, or over 1000? Potentially tens of thousands of dollars in savings can be achieved, and we do the right thing by not wasting material, energy, and resources.
