Optimise product designs with DFM

Optimising product design with Triode’s DFM process: How our ‘Design For Manufacturability’ process enhances your product quality and competitiveness.

Outsourcing the production of your electronic products can have many advantages, including allowing your team to focus on your core competencies and growing your business. A good electronics assembly partner will also bring other skills and capabilities to the table to help you lower costs, improve product quality, compliance, and scalability, and improve your flexibility and ability to respond to changes in the market.

At Triode, we pride ourselves on our ability to add value to all our customers, drawing from our team experience manufacturing over 4,000 products to date but also from our systems and processes, which we have invested in to ensure that we stay at the top of our game. Design for Manufacture (DFM) is a key component of Triode's partnering process that helps unlock many of the advantages being sought, like lower costs, improved product quality and flexibility.

What is Design For Manufacturability?

Design for Manufacturability (DFM), sometimes called Design for Assembly (DFA), is a systematic approach to designing products in such a way as to ensure that they are easy and cost-effective to manufacture. When done well, DFM considers the capabilities and limitations of the manufacturing process from the start of the product design phase. By identifying potential product and procurement issues early, DFM helps minimise expensive errors, reduce procurement and production costs and enhance product quality.

 Triodes DFM Three

Triode’s DFM process: Simplification, Standardisation and Efficiency.

1. Simplification: What can be simplified?
• We work with your team to simplify product designs by reducing the number of parts and eliminating unnecessary complexities. Simplified designs are easier to manufacture, leading to lower costs and fewer opportunities for defects.
• We also help with component and procurement simplification, ensuring each component is readily available and is not approaching its end of life, which can require expensive redesigning.
2. Standardisation: What can be standardised?
• Triode emphasises using standard components and processes to ensure consistency, improve production and procurement efficiency and enhance yield.
• Standardisation also improves supply-chain flexibility and response times.
3. Efficiency: Where else can we find efficiencies?
• Our DFM process is designed to enhance manufacturing efficiency. We optimise material usage, minimise waste, and ensure production processes are as efficient as possible, including set-up and change-over times.
• Optimising product design tolerances for efficient production can make a big difference in throughput. 

Triode’s DFM Tools

Triode has invested in best-of-breed DFM tools and processes.

1. Luminovo - helps us optimise BOMs and procurement, verify compliance, and anticipate part-life cycles, which are important aspects of standardisation. It also streamlines our quoting process and has some good collaboration tools.
2. Siemens Valor helps us optimise printed circuit board (PCB) assembly, enabling a full digital flow from product design to the manufacturing shop floor. Valor Process Preparation provides a single environment for all stages of the manufacturing process, including assembly, testing, and inspection. Footprints, tolerances, solderability, and process flow are all optimised using Valor analytical tools. Valor also helps with IPC A 610 compliance and reduces design iterations.
3. Checklists – Triode uses internally developed checklists and approval processes for each stage of the DFM process to assure compliance.

Triodes DFM process: Designed to keep you competitive.

Triode is committed to being the best possible electronics assembly partner with all the supply-side capabilities our customers need to compete. We have invested in DFM and built it into our partnering process to bring as much value to our customers as possible. Effective partnering and the early consideration of procurement and production factors in product design using DFM can make a considerable difference …

• Improved product quality.
• Reduced product assembly costs.
• Reduce component procurement costs.
• Improved supply chain reliability – reduced risk of delays.
• Improved supply chain flexibility and response times.
• Improved compliance. Reduced compliance costs.
• Fewer component-driven product changes.
• Faster time to market.

All these factors help keep our customers competitive in the marketplace.

Conclusion

Electronic assembly can be very complex, and specialist skills and experience, along with the right tools and processes, can make the difference between being competitive and not. Good craftsmen don’t only know which tools to use but how to use them well. Triode’s DFM process uses best-of-breed systems and processes that their experienced team applies to every customer partnership and new product that they manufacture.

Having the right people and tools in place is half the battle. Competing in electronics products and using DFM still requires excellent communication, shared processes and teamwork. Triode believes that Design For Manufacturability is essential and can make the difference between a product and a long-term partnership being competitive in the market.