Production (Mechanical)

When your product has huge demand, planning for systematic production is important!

 

 

 

Here, we identify the processes you will be going through;

 

 

 

1) Check your drawings again

 

 

 

When you move from prototyping to production, you need to ensure all errors are rectified, and there will be no more changes. What you should check again are;

 

 

i) hole alignments for mounting and mating interfaces

 

 

ii) allowable tolerances and gaps in areas that are moving and rotating

 

 

iii) an acceptable surface finishing

 

 

iv) all problematic manufacturing methods are simplified 

 

 

 

2) Production requirement

 

 

 

You need to ensure your manufacturing requirement are specified in your drawings, such as;

 

 

i) Tolerances

 

ii) Welding details

 

iii) Bending radius

 

iv) Surface flatness

 

v) Surface roundness

 

vi) Gaps when assembling

 

vii) Maximum or least material conditions (MMC or LMC)

 

 

 

3) Align production expectation

 

 

 

I will make a presentation and discuss with the management, design team and other stakeholders on the production plan and how to control quality during production. Any constructive feedbacks and recommendations will be added to enhance the production plan.

 

 

 

Depending on the production's urgency and certainty, you may split the production into batches if there are still unforeseen issues. This may sometimes happen when a prototype was quickly rushed for production.

 

 

You can then later rectify from the first batch before proceeding to later production batches. However, cost will increase since vendors will allocate time to cut and fabricate separately.

 

 

 

4) Request for quotation (RFQ)

 

 

 

Depending on the size of your company, you may either;

 

 

i) Send manufacturing requirement, drawings and BOM list to the purchaser to do the RFQ

 

 

ii) We search vendors ourselves either online or through our vendor list to RFQ. A minimum of 3 quotes is required.

 

 

It would be best if you are prepared to meet these vendors to explain your requirement to negotiate a good price with certainty.

 

 

 

5) Quality checks

 

 

 

The grey area occurs when the fabricated part is fit to use but the quality department failed it due to non-compliance to the engineering drawing.

 

 

Strictly speaking, the vendor should redo the work because they did not comply with the drawing. 

 

 

However, you should revisit your tolerances and decide whether to approve the already fabricated parts to prevent the vendor from suffering losses. 

 

 

 

6) Continuous improvement

 

 

 

If the production is ongoing, you will expect further changes to the design to enhance the manufacturing process and bring the cost down. Your drawings must have revision number, and proper documentations are in place for traceability in the future.