ABSTRACT
Successful DFM comes from a combination of education, teamwork, diversity, leadership, commitment, creativity, big picture metrics, understanding customer needs, understanding manufacturing processes, and management support and encouragement of all of that. This chapter shows how to successfully implement DFM and concurrent engineering. The “cost” of implementing concurrent engineering and DFM will be more than paid back by better products, with cost designed out, quality designed in, and rapid ramps into production. The first implementation step should be to understand how well the current product development systems work—or understand its shortcomings. Then, measures of corporate “bottom line” performance, such as profits, revenue, growth, and stock price need to be summarized and the drivers for those measures should be identified. The DFM program should be presented to management with the intent of getting management support and buy-in for the program. DFM training should be scheduled for all product development personnel in DFM principles.
