DISCUS for DFM
DFM Software & DISCUS
When DISCUSsing DISCUS for DFM, it is important to understand exactly what is going on. To summarize, DISCUS Design is a CAD-independent concurrent engineering tool that helps the product development team quickly create a producible detailed design, and then to share that digital design in a format that is most usable by downstream functions.
The creation of the detailed design documentation is often a laborious bottleneck for many companies, and producibility, also known as DFM (Design for Manufacturing), is many times frequently not addressed as part of the engineering design effort. In reality, the proper completion of the detailed design depends upon the manufacturing processes considered. Many times, knowledge about the manufacturing process is not reused or actively applied during the detailed design. Therefore, new challenges and demands on engineering are being introduced as a part of the move towards a model-centric environment.
There are several key “definers” for this process. It usually is a step in the wrong direction to add another step on the product development flow chart. Instead of just adding another Six Sigma checklist, DISCUS Design can help get the detailed design completed faster while requiring less design engineering labor.
DISCUS for DFM can also provide the product team with a means to easily DISCUSs the detailed part characteristics and to rapidly clarify the intent of the design. Additionally, DISCUS for DFM enables the engineering knowledge to be captured by engineers, which provides transparency into the application of rules. DISCUS for DFM supports multiple CAD formats. This enables the manufacturing engineer to be an instrumental part of getting the detailed design completed. Finally, DISCUS for DFM supports the principles of “multi-bird” engineering, or in other words, the activity of using a tool that creates many useful outputs.
There are several typical benefits to the DISCUS design. It reduces the time and labor needed to create documentation. The engineering rework labor effort on new designs is reduced, as are the time and labor needed to create routings and work instructions. Implementing DISCUS for DFM reduces quality escapes in the supply chain that result from a poorly defined manufacturing processes. And finally, this system reduces the time and labor used to assemble documents for configuration management.
