DFMPro - Design For Manufacturability and Assembly Solution

DFMPro is a CAD integrated Design for Manufacturability (DFM) solution which allows the designer to automate upfront DFMA validation. DFMPro assists design engineers in identifying features of a design which are difficult, expensive and impossible to manufacture, at the design stage itself. This helps in avoiding downstream issues which impact cost, quality and time to market. DFMPro covers various commonly used manufacturing processes like machining (milling, turning, drilling), injection molding, casting and sheet metal fabrication.

Today design engineers spend around 20% or higher on rework due to an iterative product development process which impacts costs and time to market. Also, manual DFM checks usually deployed within organizations are time consuming and error prone. DFMPro tackles this problem by automating the review process within the CAD environment itself, so that the designer can take corrective action without multiple rounds of design iterations.

DFMPro provides pre-configured as well as custom DFM & DFA guidelines and global best practices in the industry in the form of rules. The design guidelines available with DFMPro are derived from design handbooks & guidelines and from the knowledge shared by experienced DFM consultants. The existing set of guidelines can be easily customized as per the organization specific standard.

By using DFMPro, organizations have achieved increased productivity, savings in cost, improved quality and better collaboration. DFMPro cuts down the iterations in new product development process and thus prevents delays in product launches by addressing DFX issues early in the design cycle. DFMPro helps new design engineers get up to speed by providing on the job training through its contextual help available when a DFM guideline violation is made. DFMPro also acts like a knowledge capture tool by providing a powerful framework for organizations to add their own best practices and gather the knowledge residing within the organization.Read more on how customers have benefited from DFMPro.

DFMPro is well integrated within leading CAD platform like Creo Parametric (formerly Pro/E), SolidWorks and NX.

DFMPro for NX Demo Video

DFMPro for PTC Creo Parametric Demo Video

DFMPro for SolidWorks Demo Video

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Leveragining the power of DFM

Motorola Presentation at PlanetPTC

Customer Success Stories

Here are a few companies that have experienced the success of using DFMPro.
Jabil Circuits de Mexico “We have used DFMPro from Geometric and have found that it is an easy to use tool, which have helped us to develop analysis not only for assemblies on most of the products we've manufactured within Jabil but also to perform and validate that sheet metals or molded parts can be cleaned up in order to receive reliable parts from vendors. Some of this analaysis has helped us to identify critical issues during the design stage and also has helped us to design feasible tools for the assembly process.We are very satisfied with the results obtained with this tool that some of our customers have positioned Jabil for first place compared to other CMs” Hugo Cisneros Global DFA ENGINEER Jabil Circuits de Mexico
Motorola Solutions Inc. “Geometric Limited has quick, test-driven analysis tools – DFMPro and GeomCaliper. They are indeed simply integrated, intuitive and seamless in Creo ( Pro/Engineer).The results of tool aid us in improving our design and reducing issues in downstream” Paul Lalinde ENGR MECHANICAL STF PRNCPL Motorola Solutions Inc.

Whirlpool Corporation “We have many plastic and sheet metal components in our products. DFMPro helps our designers quickly identify the issues which are otherwise dificult to capture at the design stage. These issues include things like mold wall thickness and undercuts in plastic parts, incorrect bends in sheet metal parts which cause problems downstream. This tool helps our design teams understand the processes involved in manufacturing. In other words, helps them understand how to Design for Manufacturing. This leads to a significant reduction in design iterations due to issues with manufacturability and a reduction in design checking time. Our aim is to get designs right the first time and this tool helps us achieve this goal.” SK Pradeep Kumar Director – E&T CapabilitiesGeorge Angelov Director – Global Prototyping & Planning Global Technology and Engineering Centre Whirpool

Toshiba Corporation “Now 3D design data of our products are checked by the DFMPro in the design process. Our conventional checking process by designers was highly time-consuming. In contrast, the DFMPro checking is truly fast and reliable in searching the parts to be redesigned or corrected, and the checking criteria ca be customized for the appropriate checking of our own products. As a result, we successfully reduced 75% of the checking time of the wall thickness to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of our design improvement before the release of drawings.” Kaoru Mizoroki Group Manager Design & Development Center Design Dept. 9 Group 3 Toshiba Corporation, Digital Products & Services Company

Rockwell Automation “Injection molding parts are typically complex and difficult to check manually. Compared to earlier manual methods of checking parts for draft angles, wall thickness and undercuts; DFMPro quickly and accurately identifies such regions. It serves the direct purpose of identifying manufacturability problems right at the design stage and helps reduce design iterations.It is an easy to use tool which significantly helped us to reduce our part checking time by almost 60% while ensuring robust quality of design.” Randy Scherger Senior Tool Designer Rockwell Automation

Sulzer India Limited “Using DFMPro, we were able to reduce our time for checking the product design from the manufacturing feasibility point of view by approximately 90% w.r.t. manual checking. The net reduction in total time for checking of product design by using DFMPro software is approximately 15%.” Amol Mane Manager, Engineering Dept. Sulzer India Limited

DFMPro Automation helps a market leader in the field of process engineering experience significant reduction in review time. Read More>>

The quickest way to get designs ready for machining

A great change is observed during this decade the way designer design a product. Earlier designers were responsible for only functional requirement of the product but now they have greater role to play in organization to design products which satisfy functional requirements, manufacturability requirements and manage cost within the budgetary constraints while delivering innovative solutions to customers.

Functional requirements, especially for machining, translates into product design features like slots, cutouts, holes, island, etc. Designer has to selects such features based on their prior experience, or guidelines /standards. However when it comes to understanding of downstream manufacturing capability, the knowledge is often in ‘tacit’ form. Designers struggle here as at times the feature the added in design is not manufacturable, difficult, and expensive or takes longer time to manufacture. Designer spend hours in design reviews with manufacturing or suppliers and also spend considerable time in correction leading to poor design throughput. Hence it is important that designers should have access to all these downstream capability knowledgebase.

DFMPro solution from Geometric provides access to this knowledgebase to designers, so that ‘informed decisions’ based on standards and downstream requirements are taken. This saves lot of effort and also ensures to meet design release timelines and reduce ECO/ECN instances.

Machining case study for milling cutter radius:

For designing milling component, it is important for a design engineer to understand what cutters sizes are available with own manufacturing or with suppliers. Because if the suggested radius if it’s not available with machine shop, would lead to additional investment in buying a new cutter or at times selecting a smaller cutter which would increase the production time drastically. This becomes more important for smaller pocket radius.

In the case above, design engineer has created a pocket with side radius of 10 mm, now to machine this feature he needs to choose the cutter. General guideline for cutter selection is as below:

“Side Radius to Cutter Radius should be between 1.1 to 1.25.”

It means milling cutter with radius between 8.0 to 9.09 mm should be used for milling the side radius. By configuring cutter database with DFMPro it will check whether the cutter is available as per the range mentioned. If the milling cutter is available as per the range, then rule will be passed and the radius is acceptable. If not, the rule will fail and DFMPro suggest next nearest milling cutter radius tool that needs to be considered and based on this nearest milling cutter radius, DFMPro will suggest design engineer to modify the side radius value.

Conversely, if cutter radius is not available between 8.0 to 9.09 mm, then DFMPro will automatically find out the next nearest cutter radius e.g. 9.5 mm radius tool is available in database. Using this nearest cutter radius it will find the actual side radius value needs to be provided on the pocket/slot feature. E.g. 10.45 mm to 11.875 mm side radius needs to be provided in above case. It is very easy for design engineer to modify the side radius rather than using non-standard milling cutter with additional cost.

This way DFMPro help design engineer by having better collaboration with manufacturing and understanding of supplier capability to design parts right the first time. This drastically reduces the review time and avoids design rework in design. For downstream, it helps to reduce manufacturing time and avoid issues like tool breakage due to wrong cutter selection.

Case Study by

Yogiraj Dama, Lead - Product Definition and Support

Geometry Technology Solutions

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