In the light of growing global competition, organizations around the world today are
constantly under pressure to produce high-quality products at an economical price. The integration
of design and manufacturing activities into one common engineering effort has been recognized as a
key strategy for survival and growth. Design for manufacturability (DFM) is an approach to design
that fosters the simultaneous involvement of product design and process design. The
implementation of the DFM approach requires the collaboration of both the design and
manufacturing functions within an organization. At present, For some reasons DFM approach is
ineffectively including lack of interdisciplinary expertise of designers; inflexibility in organizational
structure, which hinders interaction between design and manufacturing functions. Design for
manufacture is the practice of designing products with manufacturing in mind. Early consideration
of manufacturing issues can shorten product development cycle time, minimi overall development
cost and ensure a smooth transition into production. In this paper, part manufacturability under
Concurrent Engineering (CE) environment was analyzed in detail. An evaluation system of DFM
was proposed according to CE ideas. A fuzzy set-based manufacturability evaluation algorithm is
formulated to generate relative manufacturability indices to provide product designers with a better
understanding of the relative ease or difficulty of machining the features in their designs. An
analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method is introduced to assign weighting factors to features to
reflect their functional importance. Results from the case studies show the method available and
practicable.
