Westinghouse Electric Company received the “Distinguished DFMA Supporter of the Year Award” at the 2012 International Forum on Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DFMA) held in Providence, RI. Global Director of Supplier Manufacturing and Value Engineering (SM&VE) Steven King accepted the award on behalf of the global Westinghouse SM&VE team.
“The vision, discipline and results shown by Westinghouse in closely coupling Value Engineering with DFMA are exceptional,” says John Gilligan, President of Boothroyd Dewhurst, Inc. “The efforts of the SM&VE team made a significant impact for their company and its customers in a short amount of time. They have provided others with a textbook example for managing change and continuous improvement.”
Launched in 2010, with a mandate to expand the role of VE into analytical costing, the SM&VE group used DFMA software and methods to more effectively gauge product cost and complexity beginning as early as the conceptual stage of design.
The DFMA award, presented by Boothroyd Dewhurst Inc., has been given since 1993 for implementation success and for educating the engineering community about the role that the methods play in creating highly competitive products. Boothroyd Dewhurst, Inc. was the first company to commercialize Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DFMA) methodologies and software tools. DFMA software, guides engineers to assess the structural efficiency of their products and then reduce assembly cost by consolidating individual parts into elegant, multifunctional designs. Product development teams can examine competing materials and processes and quantitatively judge the cost trade-offs of producing new designs or improving existing products.
Other results from companies presenting at the DFMA Forum include:
- Dynisco reported seven-figure savings just this year from its integrated Lean, Value Engineering, DFMA and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) program. In the case of a housing assembly, designed initially by a contract firm, redesign efforts at Dynisco dropped part count from 62 to one.
- Bill Cleary of Westinghouse Electric Company reported that, by combining Value Engineering with DFMA, their teams were able to reduce part count for the Spider nuclear fuel assembly from 41 components to two, while achieving stringent requirements for quality, performance and durability.
- Rob Cole of Sonoco Protective Solutions (formerly Tegrant Corporation; Protexic Brands) identified reductions of 70 percent in housing parts and 90 percent in disassembly time for a computer workstation incorporating expanded polypropylene (EPP) materials. This DFMA-driven Electronic Packaging Assembly Concept (E-PAC) replaces the traditional PC chassis.
- Whirlpool has introduced an enterprise system, with support from Convergence Data Services, to track and distribute DFMA and company cost models rapidly to its global departments. Whirlpool’s Competitive Cost Analysis (CCA) group is now comprised of 62 cost-engineering specialists who aid in benchmarking and competitive analysis.
- Motorola Solutions global design centers have rolled out the Boothroyd Dewhurst DFA Index of efficiency to score past Best-in-Class product families against new products in development. The benchmarking program identifies opportunities for product simplification and excellence under a common metrics-based standard.
- Bill Devenish and Kevin Marett helped PCB-Larson Davis, an acoustics and vibration instrument company, beat aggressive 75 percent cost-reduction targets using DFMA tools and techniques.
