News Release from: UK CAM
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 8 August 2005
Design for excellence
Design for excellence is a philosophy that promotes rapid and successful products by encouraging communication and co-operation, says Nik Vyas.
Note: Readers of the Editor’s free email newsletter will have read this news when it was announced. . It’s free!
The electronics industry strives to meet four criteria when developing new products: quality, cost, performance and delivery. To remain successful these have to be achieved continually. Design for excellence (DfX) is a philosophy that promotes rapid and successful products by encouraging communication and co-operation between the functional departments that are responsible for the design and manufacture of a product.
Implementation of a successful DfX programme will decrease product development time, product cost and manufacturing cycle time while increasing product quality, reliability and ultimately, customer satisfaction.
In order for a DfX programme to be implemented and propagated, there must be involvement from many departments within an organisation.
These departments will ultimately report to representatives on the Board of Directors.
It will be fruitless to ask employees from traditionally uninvolved departments to set aside time for product design reviews.
Similarly, asking middle management to free employee time, with project timescales to adhere to and departmental deliverables to distribute, will have the same result.
Ideally, especially at the implementation stage, there should be a DfX champion reporting at board level who can then influence other departments from the top down to allocate resources and time, and to integrate DfX into their regular work.
If this finds strong resistance, as does any cultural change introduced, the champion will have to be highly persuasive and promote DfX at every opportunity.
To aid in persuasion, the goals of DfX must be obvious and measurable to everyone, and the benefits must be justifiable.
In order to be implemented properly, DfX must be part of the corporate culture, and it must have strong support from all levels of management.
For larger organisations where DfX is part of the culture, it may be sufficient for DfX engineers to report to respective functional managers (R and D, manufacturing or engineering managers).
DfX is a methodology that involves various groups with knowledge of different parts of the whole lifecycle of a product advising the design engineering functions during the design phase.
This knowledge can take the form of guidelines that the designer will follow during design, or design review meetings with the field experts.
A typical electronic product development team may contain representatives from the following functions: marketing, concept design engineers, layout engineers, test engineers, manufacturing engineers, parts procurement representatives, and customer engineers.
The DfX methods ensure the information released is correct or useful.
Therefore, concurrent engineering and DfX used together reduce the development and production cycle and reduce product respins, low yields or high costs.
DfX may be used as part of an organisation's continuous improvement programme along with other tools that strive towards some defined goals such as achieving a 'world class' organisation.
DfX will reduce product development time, product cost and manufacturing cycle time while increasing product quality, reliability and customer satisfaction.
It will decrease the overall cycle time required to get a product from concept to the customer, which is a critical success factor.
Using any cross-departmental tools or methodologies within an organisation will incur problems.
Think about some of these problems specifically when using DfX and how an organisation may lessen or prevent the problems.
The majority of a product's cost is committed at the design stage before the product is manufactured.
There are many sources that quote 75-85% of the cost of a product is committed during the design and planning activities, whereas the actual amount spent only increases during production after the design has been accepted.
Consideration of manufacturing and assembly problems at the product design stage is therefore the most cost effective way available for reducing assembly costs and increasing productivity.
The cost of change to a product is high once in manufacturing, but the cost of change is even higher when it is in use.
We all have control over the processes within our own organisations.
Unfortunately, this is not the case once the product has been delivered.
Product recalls incur logistical costs, which are quantifiable, but the subsequent loss of customer faith and lawsuits are not.
• UK CAM: contact details and other news
• Other news in Design Services
• Email this news to a colleague
•
• RSS news feed for UK CAM
• RSS news feed for Design Services
• Electronicstalk Home Page
Copyright © 2000-2006 Pro-Talk Ltd, UK. Based on news supplied by UK CAM - Subject: Design for excellence