Balancing design and production priorities in manufacturing engineering: Can you find a harmonious solution?

In my experience in production company if you have own development, you need if you can split team to be one part for development and second for production. Where is problem, people from productions look target local, but in the close future everything new will be in the production, so you need to balance every time, and be in focus....

Can be achieved by integrating Design & Manufacturing Team together. 1. Encourage frequent communication between design and production teams 2. Use rapid prototyping to quickly test design concepts for manufacturability ,to identify and resolve potential production issues early on. 3. After a product has been manufactured, conduct post-production reviews to assess how well the design translated into the final product. Use these insights to inform future projects. A harmonious solution is integrate design and production processes. By fostering collaboration, leveraging advanced tech, and continuously refining processes based on feedback, manufacturing engineering can strike a balance b/w design aspirations and production Concerns.

If one can integrate below strategies then this ensures that both design excellence and production efficiency are balanced throughout the product development cycle, resulting in better outcomes for all stakeholders involved in the manufacturing process. By focusing on collaboration, DFM principles, simulations, standardization, feedback loops, training, technology integration, balanced metrics, incentives for collaboration, and lean manufacturing principles, you can create an environment where design and production work in harmony to deliver superior products.

Consider standardization and integration as foundational principles for both design and production teams. This would mean right digital tools, data models/structure, and integration across both areas. This can be complemented by establishing a strong team culture via collaboration. Above approach would allow teams to share their priorities for alignment with each other. Design and production are interdependent on each other for overall product success and it's an imperative to drive productive outcomes with quality.

Practice shows that the best solution is not to mix these two areas in one business unit. Different KPIs and different budgets.

When designing a product, the material is the most important consideration in its life cycle. This means taking into account its availability, its impact on the environment, its interaction with the end user and also its end-of-life. Knowing the resources are limited in our world, the products have to be designed in such a way that they can be repaired to give them a second or third life, right through to final recycling, with a view to recovering the raw material either for new product or other usage. This requires companies to develop the repair activity by supplying spare parts on the one hand and working with local players on the other hand to recycle it at the end of its life to minimize the impact on the environment.

Materials are base foundation for product reliability and manufacturability. Many try to save pennies per piece going for cheaper materials but then they pay for rejects and reworks throughout production and at the end customers may end up with products that do not function quite as they should. Besides quality and durability of products, manufacturability and processing of materials are of outmost importance to most products.

Some companies have serious cost constraints choosing processing methods and equipment, because of their Low-Volume or High-Volume production demands, therefore even though they prefer for example automation for consistency of operations, they need to process products manually using fixtures and hand tools and controlling quality using measurements set and controlled by jigs and fixtures or at times controlled by technicians. At the end they need Process Consistency and Control Methods.

Always consider bottom line cost, it means consider possible issues with materials or process variations and estimate cost of scraps and reworks as well as cost of unsatisfied customers, never focus on piece cost focusing on material and time for part without studying variations and the repeatability requirements and issues.

Many of companies are using complex designs and are not quite detailed oriented as needed to identify the exact fine lines between bad and good quality, leaving it to production to make the judgement for +/- tolerance requirements for quality variations that are not easily measurable (colors, forms, weld lines, molded corners,...), this is the root cause for not managing quality assurance as they need to.

The balance in finding a process scalable design is critical to understanding product ship date. Ship date is in turn affected by product and process maturity. Maturity can be assessed through its associated impact to sales. For eg, what features/functionality can the design lose while still meeting sales target. Conversely, what costs & quality metrics can be compromised without adversely affecting revenue. In the end, measured decisions have to be taken knowing there will be competitors willing to take calculated risks to launch ahead and capitalize on market share.