Polo Custom Products provides OEM contract sewing services, RF welding, film and fabric thermoforming, supply chain management, and more. Polo Custom Products works with a wide range of industries including medical, fire & safety, industrial, and defense. Our expert manufacturing capabilities and commitment to customer service have made us one of the premier custom design and manufacturing companies in the nation. Our strength resides in serving our customers from conceptualization and design, through development, to production and delivery. Contact us if you are looking for custom sewn soft goods for OEMs.

Design for Manufacturing Process

The process involved in design for manufacturing includes five major components: Process, Design, Material, Environment, and Testing/Compliance.

DFM should preferably occur early on in the design phase, long before production starts. Additionally, effective DFM will include all parties with a stake in the project, including designers, engineers, mold builders, contract manufacturers, and material suppliers. In order to properly evaluate and challenge the design, all levels of the design must be evaluated, including component, system, subsystem, as well as the whole, to ensure it is cost efficient and optimized for manufacturing.

Questioning and Analyzing the Design

If you are developing and designing a new product, having all stakeholders at the table early in the design process is an easier proposition. However, even when you are working on an established product to modify and enhance it, questioning and challenging the original design is a vital component of a comprehensive DFM process. Mistakes in design often reoccur through replication of a previous design. In order to question and analyze every part of the design it is necessary to:

• Examine the original drawings
• Take apart the product
• Communicate with your contract manufacturer to find out if the problem at hand was already solved for a different customer
• Review and evaluate similar and competitive products, in addition to end users
• Evaluate if there’s a way to make the product design better
• Check to see if the problem has been solved in a different manner

A significant amount of time, thought, and effort is expended in the DFM process, but you do not have to go it alone. For more information about the design for manufacturing process we employ when we evaluate, modify, redesign, remanufacture products for various customers, give us a call today at 888.827.2476 or complete our contact form.