Is Your Mechanical Design Department a Bottleneck?
Creative design can be a time-consuming process to meet unique customer demands. Usually, mechanical design is the main limiting factor to driving up profits and reducing schedules. You can’t begin assembly or integration or program devices until all the equipment has arrived on your shop floor. This means multiple departments are waiting for the mechanical design team to fully complete their designs and send out fully detailed drawings outlining all the parts and assemblies that comprise the automation machine. The mechanical design workflow can be long and tedious to ensure high-quality work is delivered and done right the first time because the consequences of having thousands of dollars of material designed incorrectly can have a significant impact on the timeline, budget, and overall success of the business. Rushing through this process or taking shortcuts can be catastrophic. However, there are various different methods to help improve the efficiency of the workflow and business-wide approaches to help reduce the pressure on the mechanical design department. We’ll go through a few below.
Design and Detailing Checklists & Review
Employing a design checklist that designers can review before design reviews can be very helpful in reminding designers of the most common errors or costly mistakes that can occur. Issuing a design that is missing crucial calculations, sensors, and doesn’t meet customer material and supplier standards can cause significant rework and redesign time once the parts arrive on the floor. Detailing checklists before drawings are published help reduce the chances of drawing rework due to missing or incorrect dimensions, misleading GD&T, and insufficient tolerancing. Furthermore, peer design reviews of 3D CAD and detailed drawings will help reduce the chances of missing something as a fresh set of eyes and knowledge can catch obvious mistakes.
Standard Designs & Assemblies
Creating a library of standard designs of common assemblies that are continuously used can significantly help reduce design time. Stations that are simple and widely used in medical automation applications include vision stations, horizontal/vertical/rotary pick and places, reject or makeup stations, flip gates to check pallets empty, robot pedestals and the list goes on and on. Creating seed files is also an alternative such as a seed guarding or table that designers can copy and adjust dimensions to suit their needs saving the time required to recreate the basic repetitive 3D CAD structure to begin design. Standard design and modeling practices
Solidworks Training & Best Design Practices
Investing in the training of your employees to employ Solidworks best practices and optimized performance during design can help reduce design time. Any minor time saved to design one part or assembly for one designer can multiply across the department and future projects as well. Designing for SW performance cuts down the PC processing times manipulating large assemblies.
Repeat Jobs or Multiple Orders
Placing importance on customer retention or selling multiple orders of the same machine has the big advantage of designing one machine for the reward of multiple ones. This will help drive profit margins if the design is done right the first time as well as increasing customer retention and beating the competition by offering competitive pricing and guaranteed quality.
Daily Visual Management and Continuous Improvement
Introducing a daily visual management structure can help your team be aligned on what the daily priorities and goals are. This keeps designers focused on what is important and gives regular visibility to the team leaders. Blockages and opportunities for improvement can be more easily identified by noting the reasons or trends that block daily tasks from completion. It also reduces the chance of missing deadlines. Furthermore, a continuous improvement mindset would tremendously help employees and designers identify areas that could be more efficient. Incentivizing continuous improvement ideas and holding discussions can shed light on huge cost-saving opportunities that can further streamline the mechanical design process.
