What are the best ways to develop design for manufacturing skills?

It is very easy to lead yourself astray if you do not have any guidance. As everyone is aware, there are multiple ways to accomplish the same outcome. Some work better than others. The experienced guide will have tried multiple methods and understood what works best under what circumstances. Additionally, it is also useful to be given the space to think for oneself, as there may be an idea that the experts may not have thought about. A combination of good guidance with the space to work out methods for oneself go a very long way towards finding an optimum solution.

Software tools exist to enhance our ability as designers and makers. Using these tools will greatly assist in simplification of the tasks at hand. Not only can computers do far more calculations than a human is a significantly smaller amount of time, they also assist with accuracy. FEA tools and simulation tools allow designers to have a good idea of how their design will behave under load (or any circumstances under which their design will be placed) well before the prototype is generated. This allows a far more optimised prototype and decreases the amount of prototyping to be done as well. This leads to great cost and time savings.

One useful tool for design iteration is to consider the the options available from your suppliers and set global variables that reflect these in your CAD. For example, if your design requires a copper heat pipe and the supplier provides them in various diameters. It would be useful to have that variable linked to a table that can be updated with current options. If using SolidWorks, you can then use the configurations tool to quickly iterate designs that you know are feasible.

One the best way is ask the designers to assemble the machine themselves to understand the issue in assemblies. But As far as manufacturing is considered, Designers need to understand the manufacturing process clearly, which may not be possible for all,.in those circumstances, it's better to understand from SME

First and foremost thing to be done on Improvement or Development on design especially for manufacturing skill is the designers collaboration with manufacturing process experts and consumers for merging the design requirements of the product with manufacturing method and to optimize. Because the process for manufacturing the product is more important than the product itself to meet the time,cost and customer satisfaction. Then standardization of materials and components. Then simplify the design to the maximum possible by reducing the number of components, varieties of materials and number of processes involved to reduce the manufacturing costs and assembly time without any compromise on quality or the performance.