ABSTRACT
The automobile manufacturers have been preaching the importance of designing components and assemblies that could be made easily. The emphasis was on feasibility and machinability of materials. Indeed, feasibility engineers worked in the product design departments to advise on production techniques, and their job was to eliminate the big snags, the components that could not be made. Management has much to gain from design for manufacture and assembly (DFMA) because its benefits extend far beyond lower assembly costs. In practice, many of the old methods of designing for manufacture — such as folding the sheet metal in only one plane — are shown to be inappropriate by DFMA. A producibility engineering group was formed by the company, and it applied DFMA to the reticle assembly and came up with a much simpler design. In addition to the general-purpose DFMA programs, Boothroyd and Dewhurst have developed a special program to estimate the cost of assembly of printed circuit boards.
