An integrated approach for sustainable product design: concurrent application of DFMA, DFE and CAD/CAE principles and tools

Abstract

Contemporary Caribbean manufacturing organisations are faced with the issues of maintaining low manufacturing costs and producing eco-friendly and sustainable products, whilst ensuring efficient assemblies and short product development times. However, lack of specialised training and capital to invest in technologically intensive design methods hinders modernisation of the current product design processes. In this regard, this paper presents an integrated approach for sustainable re-design of products through the concurrent application of design for manufacture and assembly (DFMA), design for environment (DFE) and computer-aided engineering (CAE) in an effort to mitigate these issues while utilising existing computer-aided design (CAD) software tools and techniques. The proposed integrated approach attempts to improve overall assembly efficiency, product sustainability and component performance while simultaneously lowering manufacturing costs and ease of implementation. A case study of a computer keyboard shelf assembly was used to demonstrate the potentiality of the proposed approach. Significant improvements were observed in the study in the form of assembly labour cost, part count and total manufacturing cost which were reduced by 28%, 29% and 42%, respectively. The novel approach contributed by this study can allow Caribbean manufacturers to systematically and cost-effectively optimise their designs to better satisfy modern market requirements, thus ensuring product success.