Why dfma

We support communities. We partner with industry. Latest news. Contact us. All site search Search. Enter your search. Why DfMA is part of our future. Well-designed parts should be optimized for their manufacturing process — and can even take advantage of it to further simplify a design.

Analyzing the process by which each part is made can lead to simpler setups and operations to reduce part cost. Materials: Your material choice can impact your cost, part quality, and manufacturing method.

What properties does your part require? How many cycles should it last? Are there any weight requirements? Infrastructure: How is your production line set up and supported? Just as you would optimize a part design for its manufacturing process, you can optimize your production workflow for its manufacturing facility.

The key value of additive manufacturing as used in DFM lies in rapid iteration and improvement. Prototypes: 3D printing allows for rapid iteration so you can test out many different designs early and often. You can cycle through designs of both your parts and their manufacturing and assembly fixtures to refine the process — make it cheaper, higher yield, and faster.

Tooling: 3D printing your tooling cuts down your production ramp-up time by eliminating lead time constraints for tooling fabrication — making it simple to produce conformal or ergonomic tooling that match the contours of the workpiece. Just as with prototyping, you can quickly iterate through multiple versions of a tool to refine it before implementation on the line. End-Use Parts: 3D printing is a viable option for some end-use applications, often due to specific design requirements that render other manufacturing methods cost-prohibitive.

It comes with its own set of design guidelines, which can vary depending upon the type of printer used. Twitter Facebook Linkedin. How about with an increasing skills shortage? One thing that needs to change is the obsession with one-off projects, where everything is seen as special and bespoke.

This dictates that if you want to deliver something of quality, you have to either take longer, or accept higher costs, or both. On the other hand, if you emphasise the need to do something quickly, then quality and cost will suffer. And so on. The way to break this relationship is to concentrate on process. We have to do things in a better way. I believe that Design for Manufacture and Assembly DfMA combined with other modern methods of construction, is a big part of the answer to that challenge.

DfMA as a concept has been around for many years, but its interpretation in the industry seems to vary. There is a misconception that DfMA is all about offsite construction.

In fact, DfMA is a collaborative design approach, a process that makes things easy to make and easy to put together ideally including commissioning and handover in addition to meeting in use requirements.

It is agnostic of the way assets are delivered, focusing only on making that delivery process better. It enables offsite construction and makes it more effective, but the two are different things, and just because you have one it does not mean you have the other.

A bridge, for example, will very likely be built offsite, because it is too large to be built in situ, but this does not mean that it is easy to make or put together - it could be an absolute nightmare.