3 Engineering Pitfalls in Design for Manufacturing and How to Overcome Them

Get your parts faster, cheaper and easier by following these simple tips for better DFM.

Fictiv has sponsored this post.

(Image: Fictiv.)

(Image: Fictiv.)

Most engineers have had to deal with supply chain management at one time or another in their careers. Whether you’re the junior member of the team who has to call around to get additional quotes or the lead who gets grilled by upper management on what exactly “4 to 8 weeks” means, odds are that you’ve found yourself needing to rely on those much-maligned soft skills more than you’d like.

Most engineers didn’t become engineers to spend their days chasing down suppliers.

Everyone wants their parts faster, cheaper and easier, and that is possible without having to beg, borrow or bribe—you just need to avoid some common pitfalls when it comes to design for manufacturing (DFM). Here are the three most likely reasons your parts are taking longer, costing more and are more difficult to manufacture than you’d like and, more importantly, how you can overcome these obstacles.

Pitfall #1: Engineering Perfectionism

There is an aphorism that every engineer should remember: Perfect is the enemy of good. Most engineers are perfectionists (and if you don’t think you are, ask your loved ones if they agree the next time you help them with a DIY project) but in the context of design for manufacturing, that’s not always a useful quality.

Engineering perfectionism often leads to parts that are over-specified or over-toleranced, typically due to an overabundance of caution. Rather than suppressing this inclination, you can redirect it by thinking in terms of “least effort” parts, i.e., the least amount of investment into design and manufacturing that’s necessary to yield a functional part. Remember: perfection isn’t the goal during new product development. Rather, your focus should be on identifying potential issues and iterating as quickly as possible. That’s why minimizing effort is key to success.

In a recent presentation at the Robots Summit & Expo, Fictiv’s co-founder and CEO Dave Evans, argued that engineers should approach product development using these five axes of manufacturing effort:

  • Geometry: How complex is your part, e.g., does it include 3D curves or internal features?
  • Tolerance: What, specifically, are you trying to de-risk with your design?
  • Look and Feel: Who’s going to handle your part and what are their expectations?
  • Material: What will support the minimum number of cycles you need to prove out your design?
  • Size: What are your shipping constraints and how will they affect your design?

By approaching DFM with the goal of minimizing manufacturing effort, you can reduce the time and expense required to get your parts in-hand without having to endlessly manage your supply chain.

(Image: Fictiv.)

(Image: Fictiv.)

Pitfall #2: No Single Source of Truth

The concept of a single source of truth (SSOT) should be familiar to anyone who’s worked in software or data science. In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, it amounts to structuring your data so that every element of it can be accessed and managed in one place.

The benefits are obvious: greater efficiencies, preventing inconsistencies and much more simplified version control. And yet, this concept is often overlooked by engineering teams working on design for manufacturing. More often than not, the product development “tech stack” is a messy combination of email, Slack, Excel, JIRA, etc., which does not easily lend itself to a SSOT approach.

This can work well enough for small engineering teams working together in a shared office space, but once your organization is large enough that you can’t just turn around and tap someone on the shoulder to ask them a question, it becomes seriously unwieldy.

In this case, the simplest solution is to centralize communications and activities with your organization as well as your suppliers. The goal is to streamline the entire process and provide critical visibility from a shared platform, rather than working in separate silos. This can be accomplished in a number of ways using an SSOT framework, including the incorporation of digital tools, such as trackers for part status.

Fictiv built one of its own, which Evans describes as a “Domino’s pizza tracker for manufacturing” as part of the company’s commitment to transparency in contract manufacturing.

(Image: Fictiv.)

(Image: Fictiv.)

Pitfall #3: Legacy Procurement Methods

“We’ve always done it this way,” is a phrase we’ve all heard far too often in our work. Most legacy procurement methods are a holdover from well before the pre-COVID days when the supply chain was seen as a functional issue rather than one that merited the attention of CEOs and articles in the Wall Street Journal.

Legacy procurement methods involve lots of time spent chasing down vendors, inevitably resulting in slower product development cycles. “That’s what’s killing products on the vine,” Evans observed in his presentation. His advice to engineers is to look at procurement as just another problem to solve in order to speed up product development. Digital tools can help with this issue by making it faster to get quotes, and to go from quote to order in a much shorter timeframe.

As an example, Evans cited one of Fictiv’s enterprise customers: Honeywell. Using legacy procurement methods, Honeywell’s average lead time for an auxiliary power unit (APU) for a Chinook helicopter was 22 weeks. That’s a result of taking weeks to get quotes and six months to two years for the parts to be delivered. Using Fictiv’s platform, Honeywell was able to get its APUs seven times faster, with quotes completed in 30 seconds and quote-to-order happening within the same day.

Design for Manufacturing Done Right

Whether you need 10 parts or 10,000, creating a plan to speed up your product development is an essential component of ensuring that those parts arrive when you and (more importantly) your customers need them.

If you can think in terms of least-effort parts, build a single source of truth for your product development through centralized communication and replace your legacy procurement methods with digital tools, you’ll be well on your way to getting your parts faster, cheaper and easier.

Plus, all that time spent on emails and phone calls can be better spent, well, engineering, and what engineer doesn’t want that?

Learn more about how to get your custom-manufactured parts faster, easier and more efficiently at fictiv.com.