DEC 2015/JAN 2016
BOOSTING PRODUCT QUALITY THROUGH COLLABORATION
A closer relationship between design and production can help manufacturing companies boost product quality while minimising costs, writes Jeff Kiernan, commercial director at Dawson Shanahan
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Many engineering organisations still insist that design is followed to the letter: if a product is difficult or expensive to manufacture, then the manufacturing process needs improvement – because the design is seen as fixed. A more sensible approach is for design and manufacturing to work together from a much earlier stage – rather than simply waiting to receive a finished design, the manufacturing team can provide early input to the process. This helps to identify designs that are expensive – perhaps even impossible – to manufacture. As a result, design goals are realised in
the most efficient way. This approach can take place within an organisation, between two different departments, but can also involve external partners such as a contract manufacturer or external design consultancy. There are many cases of such close partnerships creating huge cost savings. The skill, for any organisation – especially one that prides itself on
well-designed products – is to marry these two very different concepts and blend the artistic with the practical. The most effective way is to start with everybody at the table, and solve small problems before they grow. The partnership can, however, become complicated when the table gets too crowded. To keep it running smoothly, there will be an added cost for project management – which will need to be justified. This sharing of expertise is worthwhile if it significantly improves the value of the final product. It takes the insight of a production engineer to assess the most efficient, cost-effective way of realising a design. Sometimes, a simple compromise is all that is needed. Using adhesives rather than rivets, for instance, may break with the design engineer’s concept of the product – but it may also offer equivalent or better performance, at a lower cost. The whole idea of ‘manufacturability’ is a crucial one, and it goes
beyond the simple idea of whether a design meets all the end-use requirements. The part needs to be made as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible. This means choosing manufacturing methods that take the fewest steps, for example, or using lesser known techniques that are more efficient than established processes. As an example, cold forming can – under the right circumstances – be used
in place of high precision machining. Machining a part from a solid piece of metal leads to around two-thirds of the material being wasted. With cold forming, the waste is a fraction of this. Material typically accounts for around 70% of a part’s cost, so switching to cold forming can slash this significantly. A part weighing 345g might be machined from a block weighing more than 1kg, but the same part can be cold formed from a piece of just over 400g. As an example, Dawson Shanahan has recently used value engineering
to improve a number of components within a medical device. The initial brief was to produce a single component that formed part of a larger mechanism, however it saw how precision cold forming could be applied to other components – enhancing their finish and quality, and ultimately saving the customer money. With the customer, the company analysed the design of the parts and their functions within the larger device. After creating the bespoke machining and tooling needed to make the components, it developed and tested the parts to find an optimum solution. The final version of each component had the same functionality as the original non-cold formed components, but with greater quality and at lower cost.
www.dawson-shanahan.co.uk
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