Identifying an opportunistic method in design for manufacturing: an experimental study on successful a on the manufacturability and manufacturing effort of design concepts

The main objective of design for manufacturing (DfM) is to ensure and simplify the manufacturing of products to reduce manufacturing costs. The problem is that most of DfM methods address the limitations of manufacturing processes with providing design considerations to enable manufacturability, whereas successful approaches are missing to support engineers in emphasizing the unique capabilities and exploiting the potential of the manufacturing processes. Experimental studies are rare, which investigate how design engineers proceed when the design goal includes the main objectives of the DfM. Therefore, the aim of this research is to examine successful approaches of experienced engineers and inexperienced students during the consideration of DfM in the design process. The key performance indicators were manufacturability and manufacturing effort of the design concepts. A total of 27 participants took part in the experiment, from which 15 were Master’s students majoring in mechanical engineering and 12 were design engineers from ten industrial companies in Germany. The results show, that 83% of the concepts could be manufactured. The distribution in the manufacturing effort shows that design engineers as well as students designed 45% of the concepts with a high manufacturing effort. Therefore, we analyzed successful approaches of design engineers, who cleverly optimized the design and still fulfilled the function. Furthermore, the successful approaches are implemented in an opportunistic method for DfM, adopted from additive manufacturing, which can be transferred to further manufacturing processes.