How to Streamline the Product Design and Engineering Processes

The global manufacturing landscape for electronics is constantly evolving to balance innovation with risk across numerous supply chains. Alongside this, product designs are becoming increasingly complex, necessitating more components and larger BOMs. 

By streamlining and optimizing the design process, engineers can reduce potential issues with components related to inventory, price, lifecycle status, and other factors. Join us as we explore how today’s engineering teams can mitigate risk in their designs. 

5 Focus Areas for Design and Engineering Teams 

There are five areas companies should focus on to reduce costs as they launch the product development process:

• Simplify the overall design: start by minimizing the number of parts to balance functionality with simplicity and ease of sourcing. 
• Choose standard components: Use readily available components outside any potential end-of-life (EOL) status. 
• Design for manufacturing: Consider the manufacturing processes and design around those capabilities or limitations. 
• Design for Easy Assembly: Consider how long the user will need to take for assembly and how you can optimize for the shortest time. 
• Ensure Quality: Consider the scale of the design and how quality will be affected during the manufacturing of many products. 

Design for manufacturing (DFM) and Design for Assembly (DFA) allow engineers to integrate their product designs into everyday manufacturing and the end user. The goal, as always, is to design something easily manufactured at scale.

10 Ways to Streamline and Optimize the Design Process 

The importance of designing for manufacturing is underlined by the fact that about 70% of the manufacturing costs of a product are in the materials, processing, and assembly phases. These are determined when making design and production decisions. For example, process planning or machine tool selection) is responsible for only 20%.

Any manufacturing system should be focused on reducing the cost and difficulty of manufacturing an item. Consider these rules during the design process: 

1. Reduce the total number of parts. 

This is perhaps the most effective place to start. Less parts will lead to lower manufacturing costs, easier sourcing for the entire BOM, and other benefits related to assembly and testing. 

Parts that do not need relative motion to other parts do not have to be made of a different material or that would make the assembly or service of other parts extremely difficult or impossible are candidates for elimination.

Some approaches to part-count reduction involve using one-piece structures and selecting manufacturing processes such as injection molding, extrusion, precision castings, and powder metallurgy.

2. Develop modular designs. 

Using modules in product design simplifies everything from inspection to testing, assembly, purchasing, redesign, maintenance, and service. Modules add versatility to product updates in the redesign process, help run tests before the final assembly, and allow standard components to minimize product variations. However, the connection can be a limiting factor when applying this rule.

3. Use Standard Components. 

Standard components are less expensive than custom-made options. They also tend to be regularly in stock and have lower lead times. Their reliability factors are well ascertained. 

This approach also alleviates some of the concerns for suppliers, as they will often have them in stock, thereby reducing pressure on existing production schedules. 

4. Design parts to be multi-functional. 

Multi-functional parts reduce the total number of parts in a design, which is one immediate benefit. Some examples are parts that act as an electric conductor and structural member or as a heat-dissipating element and structural member.

5. Design parts for multiple uses 

Different products could share parts designed for multi-use. When used in various products, these parts can perform the same tasks, such as identifying suitable parts for multi-use.

The goal is to minimize the number of product categories. The result is a set of standard part families from which multi-use parts are created. After organizing all the parts into families, the manufacturing processes are standardized for each part family. The production of a specific part belonging to a given part family would follow the manufacturing routing set up for its family.

6. Design for ease of fabrication. 

Choosing the correct combination of materials and fabrication will also reduce manufacturing costs. Painting, polishing, and excessive tolerance often result in high production costs. 

7. Avoid separate fasteners. 

Using fasteners increases the cost of manufacturing a part due to the handling and feeding operations that must be performed. Besides the high equipment cost required, these operations are not 100% successful, reducing the overall manufacturing efficiency. Fasteners should generally be avoided and replaced with tabs or snap fits. If fasteners must be used, minimizing the number, size, and variation is advised.

In general, it is best to utilize standard components whenever possible. For example, ‘don’t use screws that are too long or short, separate washers, tapped holes, and round heads and flatheads. Self-tapping and chamfered screws are preferred because they improve placement success. Select screws with vertical side heads should be selected for vacuum pickup.

8. Minimize assembly directions.

 Assemble all parts in one direction. The best way to add parts is from above, in a vertical direction, parallel to the downward gravitational direction. This way, gravity helps the assembly process, contrary to having to compensate for the impact when choosing another direction.

9. Maximize compliance. 

Errors can occur during insertion operations due to variations in part dimensions or the accuracy of the positioning device used. This faulty behavior can cause damage to the part and the equipment. For this reason, the part design and assembly process must comply.

Part built-in compliance features include tapers or chamfers, moderate radius sizes to facilitate insertion, and nonfunctional external elements to help detect hidden features. For the assembly process, the selection of a rigid-base part, tactile sensing capabilities, and vision systems are compliant. A simple solution is to use high-quality parts with designed-in-compliance, a rigid-base part, and selective compliance in the assembly tool.

10. Minimize handling. 

Handling consists of positioning, orienting, and fixing a part or component. To facilitate orientation, use symmetrical parts whenever possible. The asymmetry must be exaggerated to avoid failures if this is not an option. Use external guiding features to help the orientation of a part.

Design the subsequent operations to maintain the part’s orientation. Use magazines, tube feeders, part strips, and other items to keep the orientation between operations. Avoid using flexible parts. Instead, use slave circuit boards. If cables must be used, include a dummy connector to plug the cable so it can be located easily.

Final Thoughts 

Remember, when designing a new product, minimize material waste and parts flow throughout the manufacturing process. Consider packaging, and select appropriate and safe packaging for the product.

Engineers can also leverage ECAD software and design assets from websites like Component Search Engine to enhance workflow with additional intelligence and efficiency. As product designs continue to evolve and become more complex, designers and engineers must respond in kind with more complex and capable solutions.