For original equipment manufacturers (OEM), ensuring the product is apt before it goes for mass production is critically important. The product must achieve Design for Manufacturability (DFM) and Design for Testability (DFT). These factors ensure that the product’s design is good, has minimum assembly re-operations or iterations, and requires minimum material overhead and labour cost.
Let’s understand each parameter, DRM and DFT, separately to learn how their analysis will help OEMs improve the predictability and testability of the products.
Design for Manufacturability (DFM)
Designing for Manufacturing ensures easy and low-cost manufacturing of parts, components, or products. It is attained by simplifying, refining, and optimising the product’s design.
By ensuring a product’s DFM at an early stage, OEMs can avoid any challenges that might arise later at the assembly line, streamline the processes, and cut overall costs. Its principles involve simplified design, reducing the number of parts, standardising the components, and choosing the appropriate materials.
DFM’s Principles
Design for Manufacturability is done early in the product development process. Its goal is to optimise the production process as much as possible. However, the DFM process varies depending on the product. The general principles of DFM include efficient assembly, standardisation of the material and components, reducing the number of parts, and reducing manufacturing operations. In addition, some more principles minimise part costs by standardising and simplifying design, thus reducing the complications or the requirement of parts and ensuring time reduction.
Importance of Design for Manufacturability
Design for Manufacturability (DFM) assesses a product’s manufacturing process to ensure efficiency and effectiveness. It aims to reduce production costs and increase efficiency, speed, and production rate. Efficient design accounts for around 70% of a product’s manufacturing costs. For OEMs, such efficiency and cost management can help them control the overall cost of the product and continue to be a leader in the market.
OEMs can control costs by deciding on the DFM’s capabilities, method, and materials early. Thus, including DFM in the entire OEM process is considered critical. At this stage, OEMs can decide to identify, quantify, and eliminate waste or inefficiencies at various production stages.
Advantages of DFM in OEM
- Lower production costs
- Quick time to market
- Reducing the production development process
- Speed up the production process
- Including parts to reduce assembly steps and quantity of parts
- Identifies mistakes and eliminates them
- Excellent product quality by allowing the design to redefine and enhance at each stage
- Creating a safer work environment if manufacturing activities are moved away from the site
Design for Testability (DFT)
Design for Testability is a methodology that ensures the product can be efficiently and effectively tested throughout its lifecycle. By making this a part of the DFM, OEMs can ensure that defects are identified in their early stages and rectified, bringing down the cost and time associated with debugging and testing.
Principles of DFT in OEM
DFTs are essential in OEMs to ensure product reliability, streamline manufacturing processes, and reduce overall costs. Here are some listed principles of DTF:
- Observability & Controllability – OEMs must ensure that system components are observable and controllable. While controllability refers to the ability to influence the system’s internal state through external inputs, observability eases the monitoring of the internal state at the output. OEMs must integrate design features that perfectly integrate external to internal components for easy testing and diagnostics.
- Modular Design & Partitioning – OEMs can benefit from adopting a modular design approach, in which complex systems are segregated into smaller, manageable, and testable modules. This smaller modularity allows isolated testing for each module before integrating it into the final product. It simplifies the testing process and enhances fault isolation, making it easy to identify the source of the problem. OEMs ensure each component meets quality standards through individual testing modules before production begins.
- Test Point Integration – Incorporating test points in the design is essential. These can act as specific locations where signals can be injected and observed without affecting the standard point of operations. OEMs must design systems with reachable test points to facilitate the integration of test points and observe the output. This practice allows for effective and efficient testing, eliminating the time-to-market and accelerating product reliability.
- BITS (Built-in self-test) Mechanism – OEMs must integrate BITS within their designs. It allows companies to perform self-diagnostics and test critical components automatically. It reduces the need for extensive testing equipment and provides real-time health monitoring throughout the product’s lifecycle. With BIST, OEMs can also reduce maintenance costs and enhance reliability.
- Reduced Test Time & Cost – Efficiency is a must in manufacturing. OEMs must focus on reducing test time and the associated cost. This can only be achieved by optimising test patterns and procedures. Implementing parallel testing and automated testing equipment can also help achieve the goal. OEMs can accelerate the production cycle by reducing the time and resources needed for testing while maintaining high-quality standards.
- Test Specifications & Documentation – Documentation is essential for effective testing and extended product support. OEMs must prepare detailed test specification documentation, outline procedures, desired outcomes, and design testability features. Once this document is created, facilitate across teams, use it to train new personnel, and make sure that consistency is maintained across different production runs. Additionally, when properly documented, they can make it easier to identify issues in post-production and rectify them.
Conclusion
OEM must leverage DFM and DFT in today’s competitive world. These two offer excellent advantages to keep the manufacturing industry ahead. DFM and DFT can significantly improve productibility and testability, leading to reduced costs, higher quality, and faster production. The integration into the design encourages collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement, making sure OEM delivers superior products that meet the highest standards of quality and reliability in the market.