Volume : 2 | Issue : 3 | March 2013 ISSN - 2250-1991 32 X PARIPEX - INDIAN JOURNAL OF RESEARCH ABSTRACT Design for production (DFP) refers to methods that evaluate manufacturing system performance as a function of product design variables. DFP can advise a product development team to consider changing the product design to avoid problems or improve profitability. In addition, DFP can provoke suggestions to improve the existing manufacturing system. This paper describes the DFP approach and discusses applications to a variety of manufacturing settings, including production lines, factories, and supply chains. The leading product development teams plus those involved in product designs, and those directing product development organizations can use this perspective to guide the product development process and create products which will be more profitable. Keywords: Research Paper Research Paper Design for Production: Basic Concepts and Applications * Amit Kumar Marwah ** Dr. Girish Thakar Engineering I. INTRODUCTION For successful new product development (NPD), the abil- ity is required to predict, early in the product development process, the life-cycle impacts of a product design. Ignoring downstream issues (or producing poor estimates) leads to poor decisions and product designs that cause unforeseen problems. Consequently, these products must be redesigned. Accurate predictions allow a product development team to create a superior design that performs satisfactorily in all manners. This, obviously, reduces the number of redesign iterations, the time-to- market, and the development costs. Thus, manufacturing companies have developed many de- sign decision support tools that form the class of Design for X (DFX) methodologies. During product design, the performance of the manufacturing system at all levels, from supply chain to production line, is an extremely important issue. The performance of these systems is disregarded because it is considered hard to model and designers don’t know much about the manufacturing system. However, practical manufacturing system models are becom- ing more available. Moreover, the rapid introduction of new products indicates that existing facilities outlive new products. Instead of designing the manufacturing system around the product, the product must be designed to fit the facility. Design for Production (DFP) refers to methods that evaluate manufacturing system performance. For example, does the production line have enough capacity to achieve the desired production rate? How long will it take the factory to complete customer orders? How much inventory will be required to maintain superior customer service in an international supply chain? Answering such questions requires information about product design, manufacturing re- quirements, and production quantities along with information about the manufacturing system that will create the product. II. DFP OVERVIEW Much effort is spent trying to improve manufacturing system performance by improving manufacturing planning and con- trol systems and developing more sophisticated scheduling procedures, and these efforts have shown success. However, it is clear that the product design, which requires a specific set of manufacturing operations, has a huge impact on the manu- facturing system performance. Hence, understanding the re- lationship between the two is important to the effort of improv- ing the manufacturing system performance for the product. The DFP approach requires considering not only the details of the required manufacturing technologies but also a com- prehensive view of the entire manufacturing system that will produce and distribute the product. Product development teams must plan how to design new products to exploit the capabilities and capacity that already exist. Suppliers and logistics issues are highly relevant and must be understood as well. The DFP approach can lead a product development team to consider changing the product design to avoid prob- lems and improve profitability. Figure 1 illustrates the basic idea of the DFP approach. The approach starts with critical design information about a new product and data about manufacturing capabilities and ca- pacity (the type and number of resources available). The critical design information is used to determine the necessary manufacturing operations and the costs and times associated with those operations. In addition, the approach requires simi- lar information about the other products that will be made in the manufacturing system at the same time as the new prod- uct. This is the input for the manufacturing system evaluation model, which estimates performance measures such as cost, capacity, delivery performance, inventory, or manufacturing cycle time. * Research Scholar, SGSITS, Indore (M.P.) ** Associate Professor, SGSITS, Indore (M.P.)