TOWARD A METHOD FOR IMPROVING PRODUCT ARCHITECTURE SOLUTIONS BY INTEGRATING DESIGNS FOR ASSEMBLY, DISASSEMBLY AND MAINTENANCE

Paper in proceeding, 2012

New customer demands and increased legislation drive business-oriented companies into new business models focusing on the entire life cycle of the product. This forces the manufacturing companies into service-oriented solutions as a compliment to the original business areas. Takata [1] postulates that “the goal is no longer to produce products in an efficient way, but rather to provide the functions needed by society while minimizing material and energy consumption”. This new situation affects the product requirements as well as product development process (PD). When focusing on the entire product life cycle, product aspects such as maintenance and repair will receive more attention since the companies will be responsible for them. In the product development process of today, especially in the automotive industry, maintenance and repair aspects (repair and maintenance methods and manuals, for example) are currently taken care of when the product is more or less fully developed. Maintenance and repair requirements are difficult to quantify in terms of core product properties (for vehicles, cost, CO2 emissions, weight, and so on). This leads to difficulties in equally considering maintenance and repair requirements while balancing vast amounts of product requirements. This paper focuses on a comparison and discussion of existing design guidelines affecting the structure and organization of parts in an assembled consumer product, such as Design for Assembly (DFA), Design for Maintenance (DFMa), Design for Service (DFS) and Design for Disassembly (DFD) methods. A tool for evaluation and analyzing product architecture as well as assemblability and maintainability is proposed.