DFA concepts in a concurrent engineering environment: A white goods case

Due to the current and highly competitive industrial scenario, the technology-oriented organizations have been making routine adjustments to the conventional IPDP, in order to seek more profitable business models. Identifying the product functions, as well as its importance - perceived by the consumer - and being able to associate this information with manufacturability and assembly aspects, is fundamental to achieve more competitive, low-cost and higher quality products. This article objective is to evaluate this method concept, applying it in an industrial project. In order to assess the method within the complete integrated product development process (IPDP), the activities related to the conceptual and preliminary phases of the project delineated this article limits. This study selected a subgroup of the white goods industry, where first the traditional models of VE were applied in the conceptual design phase. Subsequently, the classic DFA models were applied in the preliminary design phase. Thus, it was possible to apply the proposed iterative method, where the alternatives generated with the DFA were cyclically re-evaluated, function by function, in the previous stage of value analysis. With this, this study came to the method assessment, its gains and limitations. Then, the original design was compared with the solution after the proposal application, without the method used. Finally, this study verified the influence of the method on the balance between the value and the cost of each function, in addition to the direct comparison of the solution final cost with the version without the method application. Among the results, this article presents a report showing the method viability, its particularities, impacts, and limitations.