Redesigning of Electric Plug for Assembly Time Reduction Using DFA

Abstract

The important element to meet today’s competitive market during the development of any product is the reduction of assembling time. The industries which use a variety of component geometry Design For Manufacturing and Assembly (DFMA) play a vital role in product development. Design for Assembly (DFA) is one of the principles in DFMA. The principle concept of DFA is to reduce the number of parts used and to maximize the use of existing parts and to eliminate or redesign the parts which take more assembly time. Many of the companies successfully used this technique for product design improvement. The aim of the present work is to propose a new design of electric plug assembly that is better in design efficiency, total assembly time. The analysis is done by using Boothroyd Dewhurst DFA method. There is a reduction in the number of parts from 16 to 11 after redesign of electric plug assembly and assembly time is reduced from 87.4 to 33.9 s. Design efficiency is improved from 36 to 64.89%. In product development, reducing assembly time is one of the important tasks because it reduces labor time. Simple design with least number of components makes assembly easy and fast.