On Providing Formal Manufacturability Information to Upstream Product Development Processes: Methodology and Case Study

Process planning is a key product development activity that links design and manufacturing, and is traditionally carried out based on the outcome of the design process. One of the consequences of conducting process planning after design is that the process planning (manufacturability) information needed in the execution of upstream activities is in most cases not available formally. Using informal manufacturability information in the early phases of the product development process can lead to e.g. untrustworthy feasibility study or unnecessary design iterations. As an attempt to solve this problem, a modular procedure for execution of process planning activities is proposed in this paper. It allows for the execution of some of the process planning activities to commence as soon as the details of the order and the requirements for the product are known. The goal is to ensure that formal manufacturability information is available in various stages of the product development process, including to those activities that take place prior to process planning. The new modular process planning procedure has been applied, and it has been found that the design iterations caused by lack of manufacturability information can be avoided. This paper first defines the problem and presents related works. It then introduces the modular process planning procedure, and presents an application case study.