Design for Manufacturability ─ How to Use Concurrent Engineering to Rapidly Develop Low-Cost, High-Quality Products for Lean Production

This book explains how to develop manufactured products right, the first time around. It describes how to reduce total cost, ramp to volume production on schedule, and increase production for demand so as not to limit growth. Most design for manufacturability books are written for design engineers and focus on the parts that determine 20% of the costs. This book focuses on designing products which determine 60% of the costs. This book is suitable for anyone involved in product development at manufacturing companies, including management, ownership, and the consultants that serve them.

Dr. David M. Anderson is a California based management consultant who specializes in corporate training seminars and consulting on implementing Build-to-Order, Mass Customization, Product Line Rationalization, Design for Manufacturability, and on-demand Lean Production. He shows companies how to rationalize product lines, standardize parts, and concurrently develop products and flexible processes for all the agile paradigms: Build-to-Order, niche markets, Just-in-Time, Continuous/Demand-Flow Manufacturing, Lean Production, Agile Manufacturing, and Mass Customization.

He has written the most current book on the subject: "Build-to-Order & Mass Customization; The Ultimate Supply Chain Management and Lean Manufacturing Strategy for Low-Cost On-Demand Production without Forecasts or Inventory," He has taught "Spontaneous Build-to-Order" for AME and "Profiting from Lean Manufacturing" for APICS. He organized and hosted two tours for AME at Hoffman, a client who followed his advice and build a $30,000,000 plant to build a wide variety of mass-customized and standard products on-demand (see article on Hoffman). Since 1989, he has facilitated the Suzaki/SME video program, Techniques for Continuous Improvement, on eliminating waste, reducing lead times, implementing flow, improving productivity, kanban and reducing setup, batch size, and inventory.

He just launched a major web-site on Half Cost Products, www.HalfCostProducts.com. He is author of the book, Agile Product Development for Mass Customization, How to Develop and
Deliver Products for Mass Customization, Niche Markets, JIT, Build-to-Order, and Flexible Manufacturing, with an introduction by B. Joseph Pine II (Mass Customization, 1993), which was published by McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing in 1997 and is now out of print. Dr. Anderson was appointed guest editor for the Mass Customization issue of the Agility Forum’s journal, Agility & Global Competition (Vol. 2, No. 2, Spring 1998).

At the Haas Graduate School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, he created and taught the course "New Product Development, the Management and Design of Manufacturable Products" as part of the Management of Technology Program.

Dr. Anderson has over 30 years of industrial experience and has trained many leading BTO clients including several divisions of Hewlett-Packard, Emerson Electric, General Mills, Baxter Healthcare, Rohm & Haas, Northern Telecom, Bausch & Lomb, United Technologies, Guidant, Freightliner, Korea’s LG Group and many others including build-to-order leader Hoffman/Schroff. When he was Manager of Flexible Manufacturing at Intel’s Systems Group, he initiated successful programs for Design for Manufacturability (DFM) and standardization of parts and tooling. He has presented many speeches at Mass Customization and Product Development conferences and at internal corporate conferences and summits at Hewlett-Packard, EDS consulting (now A.T. Kearney), Emerson Electric, Caterpillar, and Schlumberger.

As an Adjunct Professor, he created and taught university classes on DFM and Computer Integrated Manufacture (CIM) at the University of Portland in the late 1980's. He then created the popular DFM seminar which was offered several times a year for four years through the University of California at Berkeley Extension.