Nowadays, it’s granted that Production Engineers and Designers must work in a concurring flow of information. Within this cooperative environment, DFMA (Design for Manufacture and Assembly) analysis tools assist with design evaluation.
Tipically, development teams spend 80% of its time solving 20% of the problems, being that DFMA helps choosing the 20% to work on. It can be seen as a systematic procedure, aiming to enable companies to make full use of existing manufacturing processes, while keeping the assembly complexity low. These objectives are achieved through DFMA and the analysis of the design ideas.
This procedure is not a design system in itself, but a quantifier to assist the development team making decisions at an early design stage of a product. The DFMA procedure can be represented as it follows:
