How can DFM principles improve the reliability and availability of your products?

Serviceability means making the product easier to maintain, including preventative maintenance and repairs. This is often done by adding features that show the product's condition. Product design can also help with breakdowns by allowing easy access to parts that are most likely to fail first. Modular design is another important aspect of serviceability, as it lets technicians replace/ repair only the broken part.

Being mindful of total life-cycle impacts; ? component cost/reliability/long term availability, ? component access for repair/calibration, ? UI aesthetics/ergonomics, ? manufacture process w/valid tolerance selection, ? end-of-life disposal. These concepts are being implemented in industry at various stages and weighted importance. Factoring them in at the start of the design phase makes them easier to implement (don’t read as “easy to implement”) and weigh the trade-offs of each.

To start, I would suggest that this thread be labeled "Design for X (or Excellence)" as what's being discussed goes far beyond "manufacturing". I would also suggest that this is more globally captured as "Concurrent Engineering". Maintenance and Serviceability will vary in importance and value to your business based on the market segment in which you operate. For those products where Maintenance and/or Serviceability are key concerns, the above definitions are fairly accurate with one omission ... troubleshooting. Conducting the right (aka root cause) service operations are as important as the cycle time to complete the operations. The overarching goals frequently are "maximizing uptime" and "minimizing life-cycle costs".

Generally Design for Manufacturing concepts correlate to improved service/maintenance activities, but don’t get them confused as the same. DFM is focused on making it easy to assemble the first time - reduce assembly time, error proof assemblies, easy to test/verify etc. At a simple level, Design for service needs to consider parts that will frequently be serviced in field and verify those are easy to access. Easy to access in the field is different than in a manufacturing plant.

Considering the assembly is usally referred to as DFMA which included the human factors. Easing the manufacturing could be detrimental for the maintenance and serviceability, so weighting between these objectives is recommended.

As already mentioned, DFX is a multi-variate trade-off exercise (hate that word but that's what comes to mind) that ideally takes place early in the process when the system design is still pliable (no such thing as "too early" in my book, only "too late"). The concern with typical/historical trade-off analyses is that they are often data-less and therefore decisions made aren't optimal (i.e. shouting match where loudest wins). By bringing data to the debate and decision process, much better decisions can be made.

Good DFM considers the ability to disassemble units that may fail in the factory for various reasons. Most of the time, the work to simplify disassembly in the factory translates to easier serviceability. Even so, when executing DFx, there is significant value in pulling in cross functional teams to get added insight and unique requirements. Much easier to incorporate inputs from other functional areas before design is locked and tooling is kicked off. We have realized very significant service/warranty costs on our products by following this practice.

The benefits include being able to reduce the environmental impact of the products. Considering these is slowly becoming mandatory to achieve the global sustainability objectives.

Key to making this work practically and profitably is Design for Reliability (another "X"). DFR brings data to the design discussion so a team can know when a design is "good enough" vs. "insufficient" and make sure resources are being applied to the correct design challenges. Maximizing reliability of the core of a system isn't useful when an ancillary subsystem that's been ignored (a little harsh but you get the idea) will still bring the system down.

Consider the methodologies and tools developed by the aerospace and automotive sectors, such as APQP and the tools described above. DFM is part of what is understood as DFX (DFM+assembly+maintenance+serviceability+inspection+...) so evaluate the design against the Xs that need to be considered.

I'm sorry ... I realize this is self-serving but ... you asked. Boothroyd Dewhurst, Inc. are the "founding fathers" of DFMA? with over 35 years of research, white papers, and conference presentations that span the "X's". Please visit DFMA.com and/or contact me.

The transport sectors have a whole industry around the repair and service of products. The companies developing designs of planes, cars, trains, etc. invest a large amount of time thinking on the maintenance and serviceability to ensure the long life of their products.

I've found that it helps to keep the application of DFM principles simple. If your product/process is complex or your industry is heavily regulated, there is a tendency to add layers of complexity to DFM application to an extent that time is wasted, and the business starts losing patience with the idealistic application of DFM. There is a balance of Q, C and D that has to be struck so that the business benefits from the application of DFM rather than it seen as an academic exercise. Nothing beats a quick chat with the shopfloor operators who work on the product/process (or end users who operate similar products/processes in service/operation). Then act on that feedback, or if it can't be acted upon, provide them with genuine reasons why

Design for manufacturing is in the details. Understanding all of the details is key to designing and manufacturing the most reliable product at the lowest cost possible. The engineer who designs the product must take ownership of the product throughout the life of the product. For example, did the engineer dimension features where possible to allow ease of inspection? Did we design features where possible to allow the part to be held with standard chuck jaws and not require special fixtures or two stage operations? Did the engineer consider how the product will be used downstream or in other upper-level assemblies. There are too many areas to list here, but every effort to improve or streamline DFM lies in the details.