manufacturing & suPPLy Chain Consulting
Our team has extensive manufacturing and sourcing expertise that has been developed over several decades of new product development and production launch experience. Our manufacturing and supply chain consulting services include:
- vendor sourcing and selection
- supply chain optimization
- reshoring manufacturing
- product cost optimization
- design for manufacturing and assembly
- tooling development and certification
- supplier quality assurance
- cost reduction
- process and material selection
Design for Manufacturing and Assembly
Our team has extensive experience designing new products for manufacturing, including the use of DFMA (design for manufacturing and assembly) principles and guidelines.
Traditional DFMA methods include minimizing the number of parts, reducing assembly time, using common parts within a product and across product lines, designing assemblies to only go together one way which is the right way, modular design, selecting most cost effective process that meets specs including tolerances, and so forth.
Though, the global manufacturing supply chain has evolved over the past 30+ years with vendors that span the globe with widely varying cost structures, overhead, and assembly labor costs. Sometimes, certain DFMA principles are guidelines that do no apply to all circumstances, such as reducing assembly time at vendors with low assembly overhead.
As companies navigate the global supply chain, it is important to know how to design products appropriately for the likely (or chosen) manufacturing and sourcing strategy to reduce costs and optimize operations.
Vendor Sourcing and Selection
Our team frequently assists clients with vendor sourcing and selection for components, subassemblies, and complete products. Most customers have a preferred vendor list that they utilize for specific processes and types of parts. Other times, a component may require a new manufacturing process, a certain motor needs to be sourced from a new vendor, or a full product needs to be made at lower cost than available at our customers’ existing vendors.
Each sourcing effort has different goals, and as a result, our team has collaborated with vendors across the US as well as Canada, Mexico, Asia, and Europe. Over the past 26+ years, our team has developed and refined our vendor sourcing processes to help clients to efficiently find a suitable fit for a given program.
We begin by studying the requirements including the likely processes, materials, costs, quality levels, amount of assembly and automation, technologies required, and options for manufacturing locations. Next, an initial list of candidate vendors is assembled and screened.
Leading candidates are visited and audited, and costs quotations are reviewed in detail. Decision factors are weighted, and the risks and benefits for each candidate are assessed. Final decisions are made in collaboration with our clients.
Cost Optimization
The cost reduction of components and subassemblies and the cost optimization of complete products are typically an ongoing process both during new product development programs and after market launch. Our team has worked on a broad variety of cost optimization projects over the past 30 years, including the following:
- cost optimization of specific products and product lines
- major platform consolidations – reducing the number of platforms and parts in inventory by using common subsystems
- part redesigns using lower cost manufacturing processes and materials
- part consolidations by combining multiple parts into one new part
- reshoring manufacturing from international sources
- major product redesigns using DFMA methods
- commonizing parts and hardware across entire product lines – a standard DFMA practice
- packaging efficiency projects including the design of products and cartons to optimize containers packing
- sourcing parts, tooling, subassemblies, and products from low-cost, high-quality sources
Underlying all cost optimization efforts is the practical use of proper financial analysis methods to ensure that payback and “make versus buy” justification figures are accurate.
Production Launch Support
Our team of engineers and designers can assist clients with all those final details that need to be addressed during the production launch phase. Production documentation needs to be in order, quality systems need to be put into place, and assembly methods need to be refined and error-proof.
The staff at Design Integrity has helped our clients to successfully launch hundreds of new products over the past 26+ years, and our wealth of experience during production launch stage adds tremendous value for our clients during this critical phase.
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