Plastic components are vital components of many engineered products, frequently representing 20–40% of the product value. While injection molding is the most common process for economically producing complex designs in large quantities, a large initial monetary investment is required to develop appropriate tooling. Accordingly, injection molding may not be appropriate for applications that are not guaranteed to recoup the initial costs. In this paper, component cost and lead-time models are developed from industry data for an electrical enclosure consisting of two parts produced by a variety of low to medium volume manufacturing processes including fused deposition modeling, direct fabrication, and injection molding with used tooling, soft prototype tooling, and hard tooling. The viability of each process is compared with respect to the manufacturing cost and lead time for specific production quantities of one hundred, one thousand, and ten thousand. The results indicate that the average cost per enclosure assembly is highly sensitive to the production quantity, varying in range from $243 per enclosure for quantity one hundred to $0.52 per enclosure for quantity ten thousand. The most appropriate process varies greatly with the desired production quantity and cost/lead time sensitivity. As such, a probabilistic analysis was utilized to evaluate the effect of uncertain demand and market delays, the result of which demonstrated the importance of maintaining supply chain flexibility by minimizing initial cost and lead time.
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ASME 2004 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference
September 28–October 2, 2004
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
Conference Sponsors:
- Design Engineering Division and Computers and Information in Engineering Division
ISBN:
0-7918-4696-2
PROCEEDINGS PAPER
Plastics Product and Process Design Strategies Available to Purchase
Ruchi Karania,
Ruchi Karania
University of Massachusetts, Lowell, MA
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David Kazmer,
David Kazmer
University of Massachusetts, Lowell, MA
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Christoph Roser
Christoph Roser
Toyota CRDL, Nagoya, Japan
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Ruchi Karania
University of Massachusetts, Lowell, MA
David Kazmer
University of Massachusetts, Lowell, MA
Christoph Roser
Toyota CRDL, Nagoya, Japan
Paper No:
DETC2004-57755, pp. 703-712; 10 pages
Published Online:
June 27, 2008
Citation
Karania, R, Kazmer, D, & Roser, C. "Plastics Product and Process Design Strategies." Proceedings of the ASME 2004 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference. Volume 3d: 8th Design for Manufacturing Conference. Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. September 28–October 2, 2004. pp. 703-712. ASME. https://doi.org/10.1115/DETC2004-57755
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