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Application
Example: A current production
printed circuit board assembly (PCBA) was selected as the product
development design to be analyzed for this example. The OEM’s goal
of lowest total price was the critical metric. Approximately 40,000
alternative plans were automatically developed and evaluated by the
Ve-design analysis.
Input Data: Design
Data required are the bill of materials (BOM), approved supplier list
(ASL), printed Circuit board (PCB) description and quantity. These
data are used with manufacturer’s and distributor’s data to obtain
price and availability for components, PCB, and assembly. The databases,
in most cases, can be mounted automatically to support automated tools.
Development of
Plans: Plan validation, analysis and evaluation then
determine best-cost best-time plans. The number of potential plans
varies from thousands for simple products to billions for complex
products. Without the benefit of the Ve-design analysis this would
require many years of effort.
The top panes ofthe Figure A depict a set of product plan results
in cost time blocks. Each block displays the number of plans within
its time-cost block. The number of plans in each cost-time zone is
shown on the vertical axis with cost increases to the right on the
right axis and time increases to the left on the bottom axis. The
legend on the right side is color coded to the cost of the product
plans in each block. It should be noted that in current practice minimum-time/maximum-cost
and minimum-cost/maximum-time are the norm. The top left pane displays
all the plans. The top right pane displays only the 40 plans with
the lowest costs including the two plans with the best cost which
are in the lower corner block indicated by the smallest block. Achieving
best cost/best time requires generating and evaluating a very large
number of plans, a process that is now quickly accomplished in the
Ve-design tool set.
Figure A: Actual Product Data Results
The lower panes of the Figure A show the distribution
of plans for time (typical) in the left pane and for cost (actual)
in the right pane. The majority of plans will be located at the mean
or average value, while the best plans are located at the extreme
(read six sigma [3.4 per million plans] or better) values.
In addition to these results, the Ve-design tool set analysis of the
plans identifies changes in the plans that would further reduce cost
and/or time. In this example two components were identified that had
lead times of 112 days that in turn drove a total product cycle time
of 147 days; three other components had lead times of 44 days. These
component lead times also have a negative impact on cost due to the
inability to take advantage of lower cost component alternatives and
assembly sourcing options. The current manual and limited old process
is limited to cost-time plans clustered about the average or mean
cost and time plan value.