Holistic Consideration of Best Practices in Product Design, Quality, and Manufacturing Process Improvement through Design for Value

Manufacturers in the US have compartmentalized their product design and process improvement teams which has hindered the generation of synergy between the two groups that can substantially improve a company’s overall profitability. Companies have pursued initiatives to improve the product design process through concurrent engineering (CE), design for manufacturing and assembly (DFMA), design for X (DFX), and geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T). These have been primarily implemented by a company’s product design team. Process improvement initiatives like Lean manufacturing, theory of constraints (TOC), etc., are pursued by manufacturing teams in a company. However, the product designers and manufacturing personnel pursue their improvement initiatives independent of each other in a typical manufacturing company. This leads to islands of excellence, which might result in some gains but dreadfully fail to achieve the true promise of these initiatives if these were implemented in a holistic fashion throughout a company under top management leadership. We have also observed that the mindset in industry of keeping product, manufacturing, and quality initiatives separate and mutually exclusive is also reflected in academia, where manufacturing engineering and manufacturing engineering technology programs at universities in the U.S. teach product design ideas, manufacturing practices and quality concepts as independent notions. This hampers students’ ability to make the strong connection between these concepts that is necessary if they are to lead companies which will use these best practices as strategic tools for their business operations to realize quantum improvements in their processes and productivity. In this paper, taking the above into consideration, the authors propose a new manufacturing mentality that we coin as “design for value” or DFV. We define DFV in the context of best practices in product design, manufacturing processes and quality, and promote DFV as a top management initiative rather than an initiative to be pursued by product design engineers, manufacturing personnel or quality assurance teams. The paper also elaborates on how the concept of DFV can be introduced to manufacturing engineering and manufacturing engineering technology students through appropriate curricula.