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Munro & Associates
Issue 006
 
Welcome to The Munro Report. The Munro Report is an electronic periodical designed to
distribute worthwhile and interesting information to help industry generate more profit.

 

Verifying Metrics Early: Predictive Detailed Business Case Analysis for a Smoother PLM Process

PLM/PDM in today’s product development environment supports centralized access and collaborative communications across all disciplines for organized process flow, accuracy and release. A common deficiency derives from a major time lag with the feedback on costs and profitability to engineering.  This compares directly to pre-CAE days when engineering had to design, prototype and physically test the prototype only to discover that their designs needed more work. Since then, CAE has proven effective in reducing development costs and time to market by giving engineering real time feedback on performance before expensive prototyping and physical testing is performed.

Generally, by the time the financial side of the business runs its numbers, the engineering team has moved on and the opportunity to redesign for greater profitability has been lost.  If costs are found to be unacceptable, more time and money is wasted going back over countless decisions and work.  A system whereby engineering can efficiently verify cost and profitability earlier in the process helps to avoid this scenario.

Click to read about how General Dynamics Land Systems is implementing Munro & Associates’ Wall Process™ and Design Profit®

Munro & Associates' Wall Process® in the ED&D Newsletter

The Collaborative Development Associates Conference takes place Sept 23 and 24 2008

Chrysler and Toyota Tied for Productivity

"The reason Chrysler has caught up to Toyota, is because Chrysler is attacking manufacturing issues at the design phase utilizing Munro & Associates' Tools: Design Profit, Lean Design, QRC and the Wall Product Development Process."  

Ron Harbour of the Harbour Report

Over the last seven years Munro & Associates has helped Chrysler improve the cost, quality and manufacturability of their vehicles.  Starting in 2001, when Chrysler was experiencing declining sales, Munro worked with Chrysler on their high volume flagship vehicles such as the Caravan and Ram Truck to deliver material and labor cost reductions.  Using Munro’s Design Profit® methodology, several hundreds of dollars per vehicle in savings were realized on these platforms. 

In an effort to translate those savings across the Chrysler divisions, Munro initiated a cross- platform commodity based analysis.   Munro benchmarked and analyzed several systems with high volume impact for cost reduction opportunities such as wipers, shifters, exterior mirrors, clusters, engines and steering gears

Chrysler has since progressed to attack the root cause of all producibility inefficiencies – the product design.  The Munro Wall Process® provides rigorous analyses of concept product designs to drive down build complexity and assembly hours per vehicle.  It solves the daunting task of developing and launching vehicles on time while meeting the aggressive cost, quality and assembly efficiency demands of today’s competitive markets.

 

 

Design Profit® Spotlight
 

The Design Profit® software exposes waste and inefficiency in a product’s design, quantifies total accounted cost of a design, and indicates root cause of high cost offenders.

Design Profit® brings cost accounting and accountability more up front in the development process much like FEA and other virtual engineering tools that are essential in today’s markets.

Design Profit® positively affects your entire business structure, uniting financial, executive, engineering, and manufacturing departments with strong cross-disciplinary business case metrics for maximum profit, quality, and value.


"Design Profit® allows us to manage execution and obtain results by harnessing the power of an engineer’s improvement instincts and intuition using a logical set of rules and procedures that encompass the Lean Manufacturing practice. It’s nice having these value added tools in one nice, neat, and clean package that delivers results to all organizational levels."

Nicholas M. Pontikos, Ph.D.
Sr. Prin. IT Bus. Systems Analyst
Lean Sigma & DFSS MBB
Medtronic, Inc.  CDRM

For more information on the Design Profit® software visit www.designprofit.com or call us at (517)347-8952.

 

 

10 Best Practices for Design From the Design Profit Silver Book

Each issue of The Munro Report will feature one of Munro's Design Principles. Implementation of these principles will help maximize the profitability of your product through its design.

#6 Design parts that are easy to self locate

Lean Manufacturing Cannot Happen Without Lean Design

Anytime fixtures, clamps, or hands are used to keep a part in it's place, you are throwing profits out the door!

Each assembled part should have a feature that holds it in place and maintains it's orientation during future operations.

Remember, touch the part only once!

 

Manually holding a part in place is time consuming, expensive, and exhausting. For parts that must be installed horizontally or on an angle, design in features to maintain the position of the part prior to fastening.. These features can be bosses, locating tabs, ledges, etc. A hole-to-hole is NOT an alignment feature! Make sure to follow other good design practices when adding these locating features to maintain a low cost, high quality design.

For information on Design Profit® Workshops or to obtain a copy of the Design Profit® Silver Book, call Joe Feord at (248)362-5110

 

 

1ST Annual Robotic Vehicle Life Cycle Conference

Sustainment Lifecycle Cost Reduction through Business Case Development

It’s never too late to develop a business case.  Hind sight is always 20-20 and when things go wrong field personnel are often quick to say, "They should have designed it like…." 

 

These personnel typically are not empowered to influence upstream design changes and are often resigned to the assumption that it’s too late and too expensive for that now anyway.  Now that they are in the thick of it, they accept that the show must go on and commence to fix the problem.  The question is, 10 years later, after the costs continue to pile up, will someone else be saying, "they should have fixed the problem like…?"

Dan McCarthy presented the need for field technicians to develop business cases to support the best lifecycle cost solutions for long term sustainment of equipment.  With business case tools, the downstream personnel will be more empowered to not only implement near term fixes, but also influence upstream activities, such as OEM’s and supply chain to trade short term expenses for long term gains.  Dan will discuss techniques, predictive tools, metrics and data that are available to assist in finding optimum solutions, building business cases to support them, and ensuring that downstream personnel’s experience and ideas are considered in future generation products.

The 1ST Annual Robotic Vehicle Life Cycle Conference occurred on August 12th, 2008

http://www.ndia-mich.org/events/roboticlifecycle.htm

Click here to see the presentation given by Dan McCarthy

 

Good Enough by Edgar Guest
 

My son, beware of "good enough,"
It isn’t made of sterling stuff;
It’s something any man can do,
It marks the many from the few,
It has no merit to the eye,
It’s something any man can buy,
Its name is but a sham and bluff,
For it is never "good enough."

With "good enough" the shirkers stop
In every factory and shop;
"good enough" the failures rest
And lose to men who give their best;
"good enough" the car breaks down
And men fall short of high renown.
My son, remember and be wise,
In "good enough" disaster lies.

With "good enough" have ships been wrecked,
The forward march of armies checked,
Great buildings burned and fortunes lost;
Nor can the world compute the cost
In life and money it has paid
Because at "good enough" men stayed.
Who stops at "good enough" shall find
Success has left him far behind.

There is no "good enough" that’s short
Of what you can do and you ought.
The flaw which may escape the eye
And temporarily get by,
Shall weaken underneath the strain
And wreck the ship or car or train,
For this is true of men and stuff—
Only the best is "good enough."

 

Edgar Albert Guest was a prolific American poet who was popular in the first half of the 20th century and became known as the People’s Poet

In 1891, Guest came with his family to the United States from England. After he began at the Detroit Free Press as a copy boy and then a reporter, his first poem appeared December 11, 1898. He became a naturalized citizen in 1902. For 40 years, Guest was widely read throughout North America.

From his first published work in the Detroit Free Press until his death in 1959, Guest penned some 11,000 poems which were syndicated in some 300 newspapers and collected in more than 20 books. Guest was made Poet Laureate of Michigan, the only poet to have been awarded the title. His popularity led to a weekly Detroit radio show which he hosted from 1931 until 1942, followed by a 1951 NBC television series, A Guest in Your Home.

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Newsletter created by Michael Pritchett and edited by Joe Feord
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