Overview of Manufacturing Analysis and Cost Estimating
In order to attain the required cost and quality goals or targets for products it is necessary for design teams to conduct a number of interrelated product assessment activities.
Technical product performance is the main factor but this has to be met whilst ensuring that the product meets the customers quality and price expectations.
The designer is faced with a multitude of possible manufacturing alternatives and very often he does not know the full range of manufacturing processes that are available to him.
Failure to get the trade-off between the commercial and technical factors leads to late and costly engineering changes, coping with inapropriate manufacturing processes or commercial failure.
Consequently there is a need to have access to specialist knowledege across a range
of manufacturing processes to enable good commercial and technical design descisons
to be made from a range of possibilities. Many companies quite simply lack the necessary
process knowledge and or the business and engineering processes to select from an
ever widening range of manufacturing alternatives.
A number of researchers have set out to discover what can be done in this area.
To that end Swift and Booker of Hull and Bristol Universities presented their research
in the book called "Process Selection - from design to manufacture." The information
on this website is a simple embodiment of the methods they recommend. For a full
description of the methods and processes please refer to their book
(ISBN: 0-7506-5437-6)
The information used here is derived from the 1st edition of the above book but
serves to illustrate the points made concerning the appropriate selection of a manufacturing
processes for a given part.
The material prices used in this demonstrator are from 2002. Therefore the costs
generated from the engine are only suitable as a comparison or relative manufacturing
cost index for selecting the most cost effective process. Some tuning and incorporation
of the later research findings would be necessary to create a process selection
tool for a particular company. A simple update using the latest material prices
would probably serve to enable the tool to be used to set a Target Cost for piece
parts in a product assembly. The tool is written in Visual Basic and uses MS SQL
as its database and could be incorporated into a PLM tool as part of a manufacturing
process selection workflow for the concept design phase.
Value Driven Design would be most pleased to discuss what we could do for your company
in this area.