Reference no: EM132315717
Textbook - Product Design and Development, Fifth Edition, Author - Karl T. Ulrich by Steven D. Eppinger. ISBN 978-0-07-340477-6.
Chapter 13 - Design for Manufacturing
Exercises -
1. Estimate the production cost for a simple product you may have purchased. Try costing a product with fewer than 10 components, such as a floppy disk, a pen, a jackknife, or a baby's toy. Remember that one reasonable upper bound for your estimate, including overhead, is the wholesale price (between 50 percent and 70 percent of retail).
2. Suggest some potential cost-reducing modifications you could make to improve the product costed above. Compute the DFA index before and after these changes.
3. List 10 reasons why reducing the number of parts in a product might reduce production costs. Also list some reasons why costs might increase.
Thought Questions -
1. Consider the following 10 "design rules" for electromechanical products. Do these seem like reasonable guidelines? Under what circumstances could one rule conflict with another one? How should such a trade-off be settled?
a. Minimize parts count.
b. Use modular assembly.
c. Stack assemblies.
d. Eliminate adjustments.
e. Eliminate cables.
f. Use self-fastening parts.
g. Use self-locating parts.
h. Eliminate reorientation.
i. Facilitate parts handling.
j. Specify standard parts.
2. Is it practical to design a product with 100 percent assembly efficiency (DFA index = 1.0)? What conditions would have to be met? Can you think of any products with very high (greater than 75 percent) assembly efficiency?
3. Is it possible to determine what a product really costs once it is put into production? If so, how might you do this?
4. Can you propose a set of metrics that would be useful for the team to predict changes in the actual costs of supporting production? To be effective, these metrics must be sensitive to changes in the design that affect indirect costs experienced by the firm. What are some of the barriers to the introduction of such techniques in practice?