Design for manufacture and assembly
Developing a product with class-leading performance is not easy. Achieving this within competitive production cost targets is even harder. But this is exactly what we have repeatedly delivered for clients competing globally across a wide range of industries, from one-offs to billions a year and everything in between.
As an integral part of every development project, we engineer our designs to ensure that they will be suitable for manufacture and assembly, considering target production materials and processes, testing and inspection, servicing and maintenance, disposal and recycling. Once analysis and prototype testing have proven the design solution meets functional requirements and user expectations, we then focus on fine-tuning and documenting the details of individual components and assemblies to optimise them for the selected production processes and manufacturing partners, while preserving the original design intent.
Manufacturing strategy
The right choice of manufacturing approach, materials, equipment and processes is fundamental in determining how a product performs, how long it lasts and how much it costs. When selecting potential manufacturing solutions for a product, we evaluate the functional and quality requirements, the predicted sales volumes and the complete life cycle, including issues like maintenance, disposal and recycling.
Our engineering team is highly skilled in selecting appropriate manufacturing technologies, specifying designs for efficient and cost-effective industrialisation and engaging with your selected suppliers from early in the project. We can also provide technical support for the supplier selection process where new partners are required. All of which allows us to support your new products through to a successful launch.
Injection moulded components
For complicated mechanisms and efficient designs, the moulded parts that we develop are often feature rich and highly optimised. To support this complexity, we routinely need to develop tooling layouts concurrently as part of our design process. This helps to speed up industrialisation and supports efficient tool development and multi-cavity scale-up.
To create robust component designs, we make extensive use of our Moldflow Plastics Insight software to simulate and analyse moulding processes. This facilitates component design optimisation before steel is cut and minimises the risk of unexpected moulding problems.
Metrology strategy is also considered as part of the design process. We can help with the development of efficient inspection schemes to control component quality in challenging high-volume production scenarios and use our in-house CMM and vision inspection systems to test and develop robust measurement methods before production tools and equipment are qualified.
High volume manufacturing and assembly
When developing products for efficient high-volume manufacture, the requirements associated with high speed, automated handling and assembly can present significant challenges and constraints on the design. So, in such situations, we typically include consideration of the assembly process when selecting the preferred concepts to progress into further development.
Our work can include designing and analysing component feeding and orientation features, and minimising the number of assembly nest transfers, for example. We are often required to prototype and test key elements of the assembly equipment so that the design and assessment of the product and its assembly are developed hand-in-hand.
