Design for Manufacturability

David M. Anderson, Dr. of Engineering, is the world's leading expert on using concurrent engineering to design products for manufacturability. Over the past 27 years presenting customized in-house DFM seminars, he has honed these methodologies into an effective way to accelerate the real time-to-stable production and significantly reduce total cost.

His book-length website, www.HalfCostProducts.com, presents a comprehensive cost reduction strategy (summarized in Section 6.3) consisting of eight strategies, all of which can offer significant returns as stand-alone programs and even greater results when combined into a synergistic business mode. DFM is a key strategy because it supports most of the others. Dr. Anderson shows clients how to apply these strategies for cost reductions ranging from half cost to an order-of-magnitude (summarized in Section 3.8) which he teaches in customized webinars and workshops all over the world while providing consulting breakthrough concepts for products and platforms (see last page of Appendix D).

In the Management of Technology Program in the Haas Graduate School of Business at University of California at Berkeley, he wrote and twice taught their Product Development course. He wrote the opening chapter in the DFM Handbook (Vol. 6, of the Tool & Manufacturing Engineers Handbook) published by SME

His second book on mass customization, Build-to-Order & Mass Customization: The Ultimate Supply Chain Management and Lean Manufacturing Strategy for Low-Cost On-Demand Production Without Forecasts or Inventory, is described in Appendix D.2.

Dr. Anderson has more than 35 years of industrial experience in design and manufacturing. For seven years, his company, Anderson Automation, Inc., built special production equipment and tooling for IBM and OCLI and did design studies for FMC, Clorox Manufacturing, and SRI International. As the ultimate concurrent engineering experience, he personally built the equipment he designed in his own machine shop. He has been issued four patents and is working on more.

Dr. Anderson is a fellow of ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) and a life member in SME (Society of Manufacturing Engineers). He is a certified management consultant (CMC) through the Institute of Management Consultants. His credentials include professional registrations in mechanical, industrial, and manufacturing engineering and a doctorate in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, with a major in design for production and minors in industrial engineering, metalworking, and business administration.

Dr. Anderson can be reached via email: anderson@build-to-orderconsulting.com. His websites are www.design4manufacturability.com and www.HalfCostProducts.com.