Design to Cost of automatic machines: an industrial case study

One of the biggest unsolved problems of modern industry is the control of the ratio between cost and performance of complex machines from the early stages of design. Indeed, it requires a synthetic analysis of manufacturing knowledge and a successful collaboration among the numerous actors involved in cost and performance evaluation. Although some methodologies and different theoretical approaches have been defined, effective implementation is still far from reality due to hard implementation that takes a lot of time and requires a strong collaboration among highly specialized resources with different background and expertise. In such context, this paper presents a methodology integrating Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DFMA) principles, Design To Cost (DTC) and Value Analysis (VA) to optimize complex system design from the conceptual stages. It presents an industrial case study focused on the re-design of a machine for automated management of drugs, where an interdisciplinary team act to identify cost / performance imbalances and optimize the overall design. The machine re-design brought to a global cost saving of about 20% and a sensible improvement of the global product sustainability and reliability due to product structure simplification, selection of improved design solutions and optimization of some manufacturing processes.