Geometric Ltd. Adds Intelligence to Manufacturability

By DE Editors

In Geometric Ltd.’s (Mumbai, India)  release of DFMPro 2008 EX, product lifecycle management (PLM) may have gained a new foothold in solutions and technologies. According to the company, DFMPro,  an integrated tool for SolidWorks, helps get designs right the first time because it empowers users to create Design for Manufacturability (DFM) rules in-house, enabling organizations to add their own DFM checks and rules that automate in-house DFM practices into enterprise-wide standard operating procedures.

“DFMPro is a revolutionary design for manufacturability product for design and manufacturing engineers,” said Mike Coleman, CEO of Geometric Technologies, “to facilitate upstream manufacturability validation and identification of design areas that are difficult, expensive, or impossible to manufacture. DFMPro allows quick and in-depth examination of product manufacturability. DFMPro provides a framework to capture and automate in-house design rules.”

The latest release of DFMPro, DFMPro 2008 EX, permits organizations to build custom rule libraries that automate the capture and implementation of in-house DFM rules. Basic knowledge of Visual Basic (VB) scripting or SolidWorks macro languages is all that is needed to build custom rules.

DFMPro 2008 EX now also supports sharing of manufacturability knowledge across departments,  suppliers, and vendors, thus improving their efficiency by reducing manufacturability issues. Plus, advanced customization is available.

Geometric has also enhanced DFMPro 2008 EX with additional out-of-the-box rules for machining and sheet-metal fabrication processes.

Predict Manufacturing Problems Early in Design
The design stage is the most crucial phase in product lifecycle process, which goes without saying. Geometric estimates that approximately 80 percent or more of the lifecycle costs of a product are determined during the design stage. To ensure success, it is imperative to have clear communication and tight coordination between the design and manufacturing departments. Finding potential sources of manufacturing errors and fixing them during the design stage is the optimal way to achieve high-quality,  cost-effective products.

And DFMPro is said to do just that. Its iterative approach to the design process advocates early feedback from the manufacturing department to address any manufacturability concerns before the design is frozen. With the “Design anywhere — Manufacture anywhere” practice common throughout the world today, implementing iterative design is a challenge, as it involves poring through detailed manual reviews, making it difficult to catch and fix every concern, especially in complex designs. This is where DFMPro comes in.

Support Manufacturability Checks
When manufacturability problems can be predicted early on, DFMPro lets users correct them before they proceed, thereby reducing overall product realization costs. It can also decrease lead time by reducing backtracking and design iterations. Ultimately, as tools in DFMPro check compatibility with manufacturing processes, designers gain the space to focus on design goals.

Typical manufacturability checks related to machining include milling, turning, sheet metal fabrication, manufacturing tolerance, and part attribute. Then DFMPro provides reasons and suggestions on manufacturability issues, giving users the ability to configure rules and generate analysis reports, which are viewable with any standard Internet browser. Geometric says DFMPro offers a framework to support user-defined manufacturability checks.

Design engineers,  manufacturing engineers, and even management benefit the most when they can stop a manufacturing error before it begins — and DFMPro offers quick and in-depth examination of such product manufacturability, says Geometric. With DFMPro, these engineers gain interactive feedback while designing, and integrated access to an organization’s knowledge repository ensures a level of basic design quality, according to Geometric. (Conveniently, DFMXpress — a lighter version of DFMPro — is shipped with every seat of SolidWorks 2008.)

In sum, DFMPro facilitates a product design process that is fully compatible with desired manufacturing processes. It helps organizations verify that a design is manufactured economically and meets quality standards. Frost & Sullivan recently recognized Geometric with the 2008 Frost & Sullivan Emerging Design Services Company of the Year Award in its analysis of the global engineering design services market. For a limited period trial version of DFMPro 2008 EX, see the links below.

Visit Geometric Ltd. directly for full details.

Read why DE’s editors chose this as an Editor’s Pick of the Week.

Access Geometric’s brochure on DFMPro.

Register to download an evaluation version of DFMPro 2008 EX, for a limited time only.

View YouTube videos on DFMPro.

For further details about Geometric’s DPT business unit, contact Geometric Technologies, Inc. (formerly TekSoft, Inc.) of Phoenix, AZ.

Go to SolidWorks’ site for DFMXpress, an upfront validation tool to check the manufacturability of your designs.

Earlier coverage by Desktop Engineering: “Geometric Introduces Design Visualization” (May 2008)

Earlier coverage by Desktop Engineering: “Geometric’s DFMPro Enables Users to Add DFM Rules In-house” (April 2008)