Abstract
Design for assembly is the concept of carrying out critical thought early in the design stage to create assembly easement at the production stage. In the aerospace industry, products have very long lives, frequently being optimised rather than introducing new products. This has meant older products, which are stable income generators, have not benefited from the latest design for assembly methods and manufacturing technology suffers from obsolescence. It has been established that a large percentage of overall product cost is determined at the design stage; thus, existing products suffer from preloaded costs. This paper takes existing design for assembly methodologies and analyses them with respect to the unique challenges involved in legacy product redesign. Several novel factors that contribute to redesign analysis are identified such obsolescence impact and a holistic operation difficulty assessment. A tool is developed to identify potential redesign for assembly projects. The tool is demonstrated through the application of real data and comparing against business decisions. The tool was found to provide a strong indication of where profitable projects may be launched.
Highlights
The aircraft industry produces long life products that stay in production for decades
The Airbus A320 first flew in 1987 and the Boeing 737 first flew in 1967 (Norris 2014). These companies have adopted an iterative development approach to their products as opposed to regular new product introduction. This approach has been vindicated by the record sales achieved by the latest iteration of the Airbus A320, known as NEO (Airbus.com 2014)
Manufacturing systems in long life products are at risk of being superseded by competitors if they are not addressed regularly
Summary
Design for assembly and manufacture (DFMA) is a method that has been widely adopted in the development of new. The examples presented by Boothroyd are of relatively low value assemblies and reducing part count usually involves transferring part functionality into other components making their manufacture slightly more complex If this approach was implemented on aircraft components, this would likely result in unmanageable escalating costs. He says that value engineering and design for producibility are the real objectives when embarking on a DFA journey He says that DFA cannot achieve fundamental improvements, because it considers the product as a collection of parts instead of something to satisfy larger goals such as reducing costs over the life time of the product. This further emphasise the point made about part count reduction in aircraft assembly. This kind of obsolescence can exist in the same company, where a more recent product employs more efficient transferable processes
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