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A Guide to Design for Manufacturability
This guide covers design for manufacturability (DFM), the methodology designers and engineers use to catch costly mistakes early in design before they delay the manufacturing process or derail sustainability goals.
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The Basics of Design of Manufacturability
What is Manufacturability?
Manufacturability measures how easily manufacturers can produce a product, given its design, cost, and distribution requirements.
Therefore, a manufacturability issue can stem from one factor, a combination, or all three:
What is Design for Manufacturability?
Design for manufacturability, or DFM, is the engineering practice of optimizing products for easier, lower-cost manufacturing while meeting form, fit, and function requirements. DFM is also called design for manufacture and design for manufacturing. All three terms mean the same thing: evaluating manufacturing feasibility early in the design process.
Effective DFM relies on analyses across different products and production methods, from tight tolerances and cooling times for molded parts to material type and machine selection. DFM differs by manufacturing methods, such as machining, injection molding, and sheet metal fabrication. It helps teams account for each method’s requirements and identify production and cost issues throughout the product development life cycle.
DFM also sets manufacturability standards for raw material and component consistency, requiring an efficient assembly process and reducing the number of parts.
Applications of Design for Manufacturability
Some high-level examples of DFM tasks include:
- Comparing design alternatives to find the one with the fewest manufacturability issues and the lowest cost to produce.
- Identifying design features that drive unnecessary manufacturing operations or impact sustainability initiatives.
- Uncovering why a design draws higher bids from supply chain partners than expected.
- Ensuring manufacturing issues don’t surface late in the design process and delay a time-sensitive product rollout.
With so many manufacturing processes and complex cost drivers, DFM product modeling has historically been a serious analytical challenge. Many design engineers lack years of experience across every production process and material. Digital manufacturing simulation puts that knowledge into design software, giving engineers access to it earlier and helping them make informed decisions as they design.
History of Design for Manufacturability
Every commercial design process accounts for how manufacturers will ultimately produce the product. But design for manufacturability has evolved into a more formalized, analytical approach to this underlying concern—a dramatic break from historical practices.
Traditionally, design for manufacturability:
- Relied on trial and error: Beyond scaling up pilot lines, manufacturers had limited ways to truly model production. The mainstream adoption of 3D printing for prototyping has eased this somewhat, but it can still be time-consuming and expensive.
- Leaned heavily on experience: Without digital manufacturing simulation, comparable past projects were the only reliable source of manufacturability data.
- Were limited to relatively ad hoc calculations: Spreadsheet tools work for straightforward manufacturability estimates, but can’t capture the complex interrelationships between design, manufacturing process, sustainability, and cost structure.
- Existed in an organizational silo separate from design: Fully separating design and production engineering can be risky, since so many parameters lock in at the design phase.
Key Benefits of DFM
Why Companies Run DFM Programs
Organizations use DFM to identify costly production issues while designs are still easy to change. Addressing manufacturing problems early can shorten development, reduce scrap and rework, protect margins, and lower carbon emissions before tooling and production begin.
These benefits show up across every stage of product development:
- A product’s early design determines 80% of its lifecycle environmental impact. Without robust DFM modeling, manufacturability and sustainability issues come to light only after production begins. DFM analysis identifies them while a product is still being designed, dramatically de-risking product development and lowering its carbon footprint.
- The most powerful design for manufacturability tools don’t just flag manufacturing issues. They offer actionable recommendations for resolving them. Often, a simple design tweak is enough to avert the potential issue and protect product quality.
- For existing products, pinpointing manufacturing process optimization opportunities can lower costs and CO2 emissions without compromising a design’s form, fit, and function. This can also shorten the time to market.
- For organizations that outsource manufacturing, sophisticated DFM analysis can speed up product development. Instead of waiting on supplier quotes and feedback for every design iteration, engineers can analyze manufacturability in-house. Cycle time, for example, is a major driver of cost and carbon, and layering sustainability into the same calculations provides a side-by-side comparison without design lag.
However vital, design for manufacturability is only one part of the puzzle for optimizing product costs and reducing the carbon footprint.
Who is Responsible for DFM?
Design for manufacturability can fall into several functions within the product development team, depending on the organization. These disciplines include:
- Design and Product Engineers: Use DFM during CAD design to identify manufacturing, sustainability, and cost overruns.
- Manufacturing Engineers: Ensure designs align with available equipment, tooling, and production process.
- Quality Engineers and Supplier Quality Engineers: Look for potential defects, check that parts fit as intended, and make sure supplier parts meet requirements before production.
- Cost Engineers: Use DFM analysis on existing products to reduce manufacturing costs.
Design for Manufacturability vs. Design for Assembly
It helps to distinguish design for manufacturability from the closely related idea of design for assembly (DFA).
DFA focuses on designing products that are easy to assemble and disassemble for repairs and maintenance. It minimizes the total number of parts, ensures they’re easily insertable, and keeps assembly to simple, repetitive motions.
Many of these attributes also support sustainability. Fewer parts and easier disassembly for repairs and maintenance help lower the carbon footprint. Design for manufacturability starts earlier, shaping products at the design stage to reduce carbon before and after production.
This focus is much more specific than design for manufacturability, which covers manufacturing processes ranging from sheet metal fabrication to plastic molding, casting, and machining.
Design for Manufacturability Guidelines: Key Principles
The following design for manufacturing principles share a common theme: directly linking manufacturability and sustainability issues to engineering decisions is a significant analytical challenge.
Understanding how each design decision affects manufacturing needs and environmental impact requires tools that can simulate various production processes using design-level inputs, such as 3D CAD files. The principles are a great starting point, but digital manufacturing simulation platforms are the key to solving the analytical problem at the heart of DFM.
Streamlining the Manufacturing Process and Beyond
Cost Visibility at the Speed of Business
A design for manufacturability strategy goes hand in hand with other contemporary methodologies that take a more holistic approach to cost structures and product design.
This resource covers how a digital manufacturing simulation solution provides in-depth cost models faster than ever. Find out what your design will cost to produce. Get the report.
The Key Role of the Manufacturing Cost Modeling Software in Fact-Based Negotiations
Generating fact-based insight into suppliers’ product costs requires detailed visibility into the underlying factors, including:
- Material Costs/Manufacturing Process Costs
- Labor Costs
- Overhead
- Tooling/Facilities Investments
Calculating how these factors interact to shape a component’s ultimate cost structure is a complex analytical challenge. A single materials tweak, for instance, might require a different manufacturing process that is available only at another facility with far higher rental and transportation costs.
The right manufacturing cost modeling software makes it easier to generate detailed cost-structure insights that inform supplier negotiations
Three Steps to Design for Manufacturability
1. Incorporate DFM Analysis as Early as Possible in the Design Process: Unlocking DFM’s full benefits takes a variety of computationally intensive analyses that are most valuable while engineers are still designing the product. DFM catches the most issues during the concept and prototype stages, before a design reaches manufacturing review, when changes still cost little to make. The right software makes this possible without slowing innovation, compromising sustainability efforts, or delaying product development. Design engineers respond to schedule pressure more than cost, so catching issues early keeps launch dates on track better than cutting expenses alone.
2. Recognize Opportunities for Cooperative Product Development: When manufacturing happens in-house, production and designers should collaborate on design choices that fit real manufacturing resources and constraints. When working with suppliers, DFM builds that same collaborative bridge, helping both parties identify manufacturability issues and support sustainability goals early in the design process. This type of collaboration matters more than ever, as manufacturers increasingly outsource production to supply chain partners across different countries, time zones, and languages. DFM analysis, grounded in digital manufacturing simulation, lets them review and mark up new designs together in ways that weren’t possible a decade ago.
3. Integrate with a Broader Strategy for Manufacturing Cost Modeling: Manufacturability is one of the most difficult factors to analyze at the design stage. However, it’s not the only one influencing a product’s cost structure. Product weight, size, material utilization, scrap, rework, tooling costs, labor, and overhead all have a major impact on that structure and are closely tied to manufacturability.
Want to cut costs and avoid late-stage rework? Listen to our podcast on getting cost right the first time.
Examples of Design for Manufacturability
The following organizations used aPriori digital manufacturing simulation to bring deeper manufacturability modeling capabilities to their design process.
Carrier Saves $21 Million by Giving Design Engineers Cost Data
Carrier wanted design engineers to get should cost data without waiting on a formal quote. Using aP Design, Carrier’s engineers now run cost modeling as a project moves through PLM gates and the rest of the review process, finding cost problems before they reach sourcing. The team found $21 million in savings in a single year. Watch the video to learn more.
Saab Naval Cuts Part Cost by More Than Half by Catching Early Design Flaws
Saab Naval needed to fix a six-piece welded submarine assembly that kept warping during welding. Engineers used aPriori to check cost and manufacturability together at the concept stage, then redesigned the assembly as a single machined part. That one change reduced the cost per unit from $3,100 to $1,300 and solved that expensive problem. Submarines now stay on schedule, and performance holds up. Watch the video to learn more.
What to Look for in Design for Manufacturability Software
To maximize its impact, design for manufacturability software needs precise analytical capabilities across many manufacturing processes. It should provide these insights to design engineers in real time, so they can quickly assess the implications of diverse manufacturing scenarios for various design alternatives. Watch our webinar on quantified DFM to see this precision in action.
DFM Software Should Be Fast and Easy to Use
To generate manufacturing analyses at the design stage, your software needs to be fast and easy to use. With aPriori, the process starts by analyzing a 3D CAD model to generate a digital twin. After specifying a few basic inputs such as production volume, manufacturing process, and region, aPriori can then simulate production in a digital factory to generate manufacturability, sustainability, and cost models in seconds.
When evaluating DFM software, look for these capabilities:
- Automated PLM workflows: Runs background simulations and emails DFM, cost, and carbon results through PLM integration.
- Cost, DFM, and carbon analysis: Analyzes manufacturability, cost, and carbon emissions in one simulation.
- Risk scores: Flags DFM issues as High, Medium, or Low risk and shows the features that add cost.
- CAD and PMI data: Reads dimensions, tolerances, and Product Manufacturing Information (PMI) directly from CAD models.
- Digital factory setup: Mirrors actual plant equipment and capabilities to reduce false alerts.
The analysis should also be easy to interpret. Visual results should show engineers exactly where a design may cause manufacturing problems. For example, the system could flag machining operations with unusually high cycle times. Engineers can then review the design and fix issues that slow production and increase cost.
Effective DFM Software Simulates Key Manufacturing Processes
To generate in-depth DFM insights, there is no substitute for detailed digital manufacturing simulation.
This simulation needs to cover a range of production processes, so the digital factory can model nearly any design. Here’s a representative sample of manufacturing processes. aPriori supports out of the box:
For the full list of process models aPriori uses, download our data sheet.
To realize the full value of your DFM software, the final ingredient is a cultural shift toward cost-conscious, sustainable product engineering. Engineers learn to prioritize functionality and reliability first, so design-stage manufacturability modeling adds analytical complexity. Generating the most impactful estimate takes a willingness to rethink a product from the ground up.
For a comprehensive overview of our Regional Data Libraries (RDLs), download our data sheet.
Selecting the Right Software Is Vital to Maximizing Strategy
As this guide has shown, the analytical capabilities behind understanding a design’s manufacturability and sustainability drive real business value: faster product development, a lower carbon footprint, unprecedented cooperation between designers and manufacturing engineers, and ultimately, more cost-competitive products.
For comprehensive analysis, DFM software needs to estimate manufacturability implications across production, labor, and distribution. But even the most thorough analysis won’t provide these benefits unless it fits a fast-paced, collaborative design process, which is exactly why selecting the right DFM toolkit is so critical.
aPriori Provides Actionable Insights for Better Manufacturing
aPriori delivers a unique, end-to-end digital twin solution that helps manufacturers rapidly find new opportunities for innovation and growth. Customers achieve a ~600% ROI, with payback within six months of adopting our platform. aPriori also boosts manufacturers’ digital thread investments to deliver business value at scale, increase agility, and minimize risk.
Some of the world’s most innovative and sustainable manufacturers use aPriori, including Boeing, Carrier, Danfoss, and Navistar. Headquartered in Concord, Mass., U.S., aPriori also has offices in Germany, Japan, Northern Ireland, and Sweden.
