Shipulski On Design

Archive for November, 2008

John Teresco of Industry Week wrote a good article that shows how up upfront design enables the next level of improvments in Lean and Six Sigma.

Here are several excerpts:

At Hypertherm Inc., a manufacturer of plasma cutting systems, the DFMA software enabled a first pass part count reduction as high as 50%, says Mike Shipulski, Hypertherm’s director of engineering. About 500 parts were eliminated from the product, a main power supply sub-assembly that originally contained about 1,000 parts. Shipulski says the resulting reduction in assembly floor space requirements made it possible to satisfy a growing market demand within the existing building. “We didn’t have to add floor space.” Read the rest of this entry »

(This post was published as an article.  View the article as a .pdf or .htm.)

Have we read enough, talked enough, circled, and delayed the issue enough to finally do something about the decline in US manufacturing?  Are we afraid enough yet, after each quarterly government trade report, to undertake what is obvious as far as engineering goes? We have the technical know-how in US manufacturing to take away the offshoring advantage of cheap labor.We can design high labor costs out of most products and have elegant assemblies ripple profitably down US manufacturing lines—for export and domestic consumption.

“We have to reassign the product costs mistakenly
placed on manufacturing departments.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Results from a new survey show that upfront design using DFMA methods creates significant savings in operational cost — downstream savings.

An exerpt from the survey:

Sixty-eight percent of a survey group, including Fortune 400 companies, measured an increase in production throughput, and 47 percent an increase in profit per unit of factory floor space, after applying Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DFMA®) techniques to their organizations’ supply chains. A roundtable discussion of these and other results from the questionnaire, conducted by Boothroyd Dewhurst, Inc., is now available.

Respondents included Dell, Motorola, TRW Automotive, Raytheon, MDS Analytical Technologies, Magna Intier Automotive Seating and other leading North American manufacturers. Some participants also contributed to a candid roundtable discussion about applying design simplification and early costing to Lean and Six Sigma programs, along with the opportunities missed by industry in measuring financial best practices.