Working With Customers To Increase Part Manufacturability
Productivity starts at the quoting stage. All too often jobs are quoted, the job is secured, and then dumped onto employees with no consideration of the fine details of manufacturability, and how it impacts overall productivity. It’s often assumed the engineer has already considered this.
Considering manufacturability in CNC machining is important because it ensures that the design of a product can be easily and efficiently produced with the available equipment and processes. This can impact the cost, quality, and lead time of the product, as well as the overall production efficiency. If manufacturability is not taken into account, the product may require expensive modifications or additional processing steps, leading to increased costs and potentially longer lead times. Additionally, poorly designed parts can be more difficult or impossible to produce with the desired level of accuracy and quality, resulting in rejections and waste.
Some important questions to ask yourself, and later your customer, are:
Are there any areas in the design where material can be added or removed to improve machinability?
Can the size and shape of features be changed to simplify the machining process?
Can the part be designed with standard tooling in mind to reduce costs and lead time?
Are there any secondary operations that can be eliminated or simplified by modifying the part geometry?
Can the part be designed to minimize the amount of material removal and reduce cycle time?
And lastly, would the customer be open to a design review to identify any potential manufacturability improvements?
These are all important questions to ask your customers. While at first it may seem better to simply take the job as-is; communicating with the potential customer and showing them that you are considering both their time (your lead time) and their money, will keep you coming out on top while giving them quality parts.
Some common features that can be reviewed are:
Excessive radii/strangely angled chamfers on edges.
Overly tight tolerances on all features.
Overly small radii on internal corners.
Broached corners instead of dog-bones.
If this seems complicated, or confusing, William Machine Productivity can help by training your job-shop quoting team, or looking over your parts to help identify and fix common manufacturability issues.
