For new large-system product to be quickly and easily manufactured it must be compatible with a company's existing production systems. Currently there are no formal feedback tools for the designers. There are only informal methods like concurrent engineering meetings. I have research underway to explore and develop technology and methods to allow design teams to integrate manufacturing into a product development process. All U.S. manufacturers are racing to build products better and faster, and most experts recognize the design phase as key.
Industry needs the means to design high quality, easily manufactured products quickly.
Multi-disciplinary approaches such as concurrent engineering are tried, but these are management approaches, not design and manufacturing tools. They guide the work, they do not help do the work. We are working on methods to approach production facilities and construct manufacturing constraint models, to indicate what is difficult for the intended production facility to manufacture. The goal is to deliver models and procedures for constructing them, so that a design team can evaluate manufacturability at the design stage and thereby reducing future bottlenecks when in production, thereby decreasing the time to market. We are developing methods whereby a design team starts with a basic sequence of operations transforming the incoming material into the final product, which is diagrammed into a topology of the operational sequence.