DFMA : A Methodology Study and Method Development

Sammanfattning: Volvo Cars Corporation (VCC) is devoted to Lean and Six Sigma, and has lately considered an imple-mentation of Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DFMA) with the purpose of improving their product design process and production. The goal for this project work is therefore to investigate if DFMA is a beneficial method for VCC to use, how DFMA can be used and suggest a DFMA method. A literature study is performed as a starting point to understand DFMA methods and its possibilities. Scientific articles, technical books and online sources is used during the study in order to gather in-formation regarding DFMA implementations, application areas, approaches and potential risks that need to be eliminated for a successful implementation. In order to map the product development and manufacturing processes of VCC interviews are per-formed. The interviews also gathered information regarding what VCC employees thinks of DFMA and how they wish to use it. This information is compiled into a demand specification where the de-mands are weighted after importance by the interviewees. After the pre-study, three idea generation sessions is performed with three different focus groups. The generated ideas are then evaluated and classified. The remaining ideas are classified with the purpose of enabling the possibility to use a morphological chart to build whole concepts from the single ideas. Three concepts are chosen amongst the generated concepts. These concepts are then evaluated against the weighted demand specification. The concept considered most suitable is further devel-oped which resulted in a proposed DFMA method for VCC. A case study on a product is performed in order to communicate, test and evaluate the final DFMA method. The project is rounded off with discussions regarding DFMA and the suggested method from sustain-ability point of view and how to motivate usage. All results and discussions from the project are handed over to the company, enabling further research on a possible implementation of DFMA in the organization.