CHAPTER

DESIGN FOR MANUFACTURE AND ASSEMBLY:

THE BOOTHROYD-DEWHURST EXPERIENCE

Geoffrey Boothroyd

This chapter explains how the Boothroyd-Dewhurst (B&D) Design for Manufacture and
Assembly (DFMA) works, discusses the experience and benefits of using DFMA by world-
class manufacturers, and highlights implementation issues.
It has been estimated that, in the US, manufacturing contributes about 23% of the gross
national product but, more importantly, about 70% of all wealth producing activities. Those
who complacently say that the US is changing to a service economy might eventually find that
they no longer have the means to purchase these services. The US has been losing $340
million per day to its foreign competitors and the national debt is now around $4 trillion!
Competitiveness has been lost in many areas, but most notably in automobile manufacture,
as highlighted by the results of the $5 million world-wide study of this industry that was
published in 1990 (Womack et al., 1990). The study, which showed that Japan has the most
productive plants, attempted to explain the wide variations in auto assembly plant productivity
throughout the world. It was found that automation could only account for one-third of the
total difference in productivity between plants world-wide and that, at any level of
automation, the difference between the most and least efficient plant is enormous.
Womack et al. (1990) concluded that no improvements in operation can make a plant fully
competitive if the product design is defective. However, they failed to make a direct
connection between product design and productivity. Whereas the author of this chapter
believes that, and as this chapter will help to show, there is now overwhelming evidence to
support the view that product design for manufacture and assembly can be the key to high
productivity in all manufacturing industries.

G. Q. Huang (ed.), Design for X

© Chapman & Hall 1996
20 The B & D DFMA Experience

1.1 DESIGN FOR MANUFACTURE AND ASSEMBLY

That designers should give attention to possible manufacturing problems associated with a
design has been advocated for many years. Traditionally, the idea was that a competent
designer should be familiar with manufacturing processes to avoid adding unnecessarily to
manufacturing costs.
However, for reasons such as the increasingly complex technology incorporated within
many products; the time pressures put on designers to get designs on to the shop floor; the
"we design it, you manufacture it" attitude of designers; and the increasing sophistication of
manufacturing techniques, this simple view of the product development process has become
invalid.
It is, therefore, becoming recognized that more effort is required to take manufacturing and
assembly into account early in the product design cycle. One way of achieving this is for
manufacturing engineers to be part of a simultaneous or concurrent engineering design team.
Within this teamworking, design for manufacture and 'assembly (DFMA) analysis tools
help in the evaluation of proposed designs. It is important that design teams have access to
such tools in order to provide a focal point which helps identify problems from manufacturing
and design perspectives. In terms of the 80/20 rule, teams spend 80% of the time on 20% of
the problems, and DFMA helps the team identify the right 20% to work on.
DFMA is a systematic procedure that aims to help companies make the fullest use of the
manufacturing processes that exist and keep the number of parts in an assembly to the
minimum. It achieves this by enabling the analysis of design ideas. It is not a design system,
and any innovation must come from the design team, but it does provide quantification to help
decision-making at the early stages of design.

Suggestions for simplification

f - - - - - - - - - . ! of product structure
L - , -_ _ _---'

Suggestions for more economi

I---II~ materials and processes

Detail design for minimum

I--------~ manufacturing costs
L-.----_ _ _ _---'

Figure 1.1 Typical steps taken in a simultaneous engineering study using DFMA.