In the early 1970s, University of Massachusetts professor Geoffrey Boothroyd and his colleagues began research on what would become the basis for the Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DFMA) method.
The goal of Boothroyd’s work in manufacturing was to provide designers with a technique to quantify product designs for the ease of automatic assembly. Boothroyd’s ground-breaking research exposed the fact that this practice actually led to substantially higher product costs relative to the use of fewer, multi-functional parts. Alongside Peter Dewhurst, a computerized Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DFMA) method was developed, which continues to be used to estimate the time for manual assembly of a product and the cost of assembling the product on an automatic assembly machine.
Overall, DFMA gives companies more control over their manufacturing costs. By implementing Boothroyd and Dewhurst’s method, companies have been able to save millions of dollars. DFMA continues to be one of the most widely used methods of manufacturing in the world.
By Jen Santisi
