We can make factory designs better by combining product design and process planning into a common activity to yield economic and process efficiencies for the client. The design is important because it affects 70% of the cost of a product while production only accounts for 20%. Thus, by catering to the design elements and principles for efficacy. It is possible to cut waste, improve functionality while also cutting costs.
The following are the rules followed in factory planning, designing factories, and assemblies to ensure that product features are perfect, purposeful, and necessary, while the design remains attractive useful, and affordable.
Various Steps For Factory Planning
The first and most important consideration made is the number of parts in a product. Because it represents the best opportunity for cutting costs. The associated processes of production like purchases, inventory, handling, and equipment engineering reduce with every subtraction of parts of the total product.
Still, the reduction of some parts happens under careful considerations of the appropriate method to be used and the need for making assembly and service easy. One-piece structures and manufacturing processes like extrusion, precision casting, powdered metallurgy plus precision cutting are encouraged.
A modular design is also used for achieving the goals of reducing costs through design. It simplifies manufacturing by reducing the time spent on inspection, testing, purchasing, maintenance, and service. The use of standard components also offers room for mass production without substantially increasing the cost of production as it would have happened when using custom components.
The other trick is to design parts that serve more than one purpose. Multi-functional parts lower the maximum number of parts in the design, and they help to fulfill the intention of having fewer parts from the beginning.
A similar consideration is the design of parts for multi-use, and it is slightly differing from the multifunction part. A multi-use piece can be placed in different products for various uses while the multi-function one plays different roles in the same product.
The outcome is achieved by first coming up with an arrangement of parts of part families and then producing specific parts based on the manufacturing routing that represents the family. Meanwhile, all operations that are not needed are skipped. New product designs can then accommodate the same multi-use components by using them on their manufacturing routing.
When designing factories, the ease of fabrication is a design tactic that lets the production have the optimum combination of materials and fabrication process. The intention is to cut the manufacturing costs by having no need for final operations like polishing and painting or machine finishing.
The same can be said for the avoidance of fasteners, which is another redesign guideline that substantially cuts manufacturing costs. It eliminates the need to use the equipment, and it also eliminates the errors that would arise from the process, which could negatively affect the overall manufacturing process.
The other major contributions made by design changes arise after the following three strategies. The initial one is to minimize assembly direction so that all parts are assembled from one direction. Possibly from above in a vertical way so that gravity aids the assembly process. And there is no need for compensating against its force.
This approach helps to lower the cost of manufacturing because the work done by individuals and machines is minimized. The additional strategy for consideration is maximizing compliance, and the approach calls for the inclusion of compliance as an element of part design in the assembly process. By having built-in features like average radius sizes to enhance compliance, while also having a rigid base section makes for a functional layout.
Finally, the design strategies will also include considerations for minimum handling because that makes up part of the manufacturing cost implication and can lead to the need for other parts. Positioning, orienting, and fixing a part of the product constitutes handling. It is important to consider the use of regular parts and have external guiding features to use for the orientation of a part.
Also, the additional operation must be designed to maintain the orientation that has already been selected. The avoidance of soft parts also enhances handling, and when there is a need for cabling. It should have a dummy connector for plugging the cabling as seen in the robotic assembly.
Overall, these design strategies are critical to the cost-cutting requirements of a modern responsive manufacturing process. And they are applicable in numerous industries with different production scale settings.