Speaker
Description
Designing a system is a complex process and there are a lot of people involved with different competencies. All competencies should be complementary to each other with some overlap, and everyone should have the same goal. Everyone is giving their best to reach the goal to the best of their capabilities. Oftentimes, manufacturing knowledge is not taken into account because a supplier is not yet selected, sometimes because of certain organisational constraints.
To come up with an ideal design that is both sustainable and affordable, engineers should involve manufacturers at a very early stage. Manufacturers can give their inputs starting in the definition phase, influencing the design later on. Early tests can be done to provide the designer with feedback about limitations.
This approach will take some extra time at the start of the design process, but that investment will pay back later in the project. Fewer mistakes will be made in the design phase and transfer to manufacturing will be much smoother since the manufacturer was a part of the design process. Also, the cost will be lower. Manufacturing knowledge is now integrated correctly into the design.
Even when suppliers are already involved in the early stages, different manufacturing options can be developed concurrently with the design to achieve systems that go beyond the state of the art and require processes that are beyond the current state of the art. This however takes extra time; when done concurrently it can be ready at the same time when the system design is ready.
Pulling the supplier selection forward makes a lot of sense; it helps to create an optimal design with fitting manufacturing processes.