Design to Cost

 

One of the most frequent causes of Engineering changes are manufacturability issues – parts that cannot be manufactured with sufficient quality for a reasonable cost or in some cases at all. These Engineering changes are often disruptive to the design cycles and can consume precious time and resources. In this example, you will learn a suggested workflow to identify and resolve potential manufacturability issues while identifying features driving highest costs on a component before a product is released.

 

Identifying Parts with Manufacturability Issues

  1. Within aPriori Analytics, navigate to Reports and select the appropriate commodity based DTC report.

  2. This analysis will show all of the parts within the selected dataset plotted on a cost/mass graph with high/low guard bands. The size of the bubble will denote the annual spend, while the color represents DFM issues. We suggest a user targets large, purple bubble outside the guard bands as these represent high spend parts with significant manufacturing issues that have a cost/mass far outside the other parts in the cohort.

Interacting with aPriori DFM Guidance

  1. Open the desired part in aPriori Design.

  2. Navigate to the Design Guidance card and expand by clicking OPEN.

  3. The Design Guidance shows potential manufacturing issues (highlighted on the part) with a description of the issue and techniques to mitigate.

  1. We recommend going through each of the lines of guidance individually and evaluate whether the design recommendation can be reasonably implemented based on functional requirements.

 

Tip: Clicking on an issue will provide a summary of the manufacturability issue.

Example

  1. We start by analyzing a stock machined component. Click the OPEN icon to open the Cost Results card. You can use the information here to review which category most of the cost can be attributed to.

  2. Looking at the Material & Processes card, we can see the breakdown of cost between the processes associated with the scenario. In this scenario 4-axis mill makes up most of the manufacturing, we’ll start our investigation there.

  3. Next, we’ll investigate the aPriori’s Design guidance. The Design Guidance card will allow you to take a deeper dive into the cost driving features of the part; in this example we have many milling L/D ratios that exceed the recommended limits.

  4. From the Investigation tab, we can see a breakdown of the features with the longest cycle time as well as the percentage of the total cycle time. This example shows two curved features that are slow to machine.

  5. After adjustments are made to the CAD file, the updated file shows alleviation of manufacturing issues and adjustment of cost results.