Systematic Process Selection in Mechanical Design

There has been a recent awareness of the importance of making the right manufacturing decisions early in the design process before the cost penalty of making changes becomes too high. The selection of the most appropriate manufacturing process — of which there are a very large number — is one such decision. It is commonly based on human-resident experience or on established local practice. As such, some potentially-usable processes may be overlooked. This paper explores ways in which process selection might be made more systematic. It presents a procedure for manufacturing process selection which considers all manufacturing processes and eliminates the ones which cannot satisfy the design requirements. This is achieved using Process Selection Charts in which process capabilities are displayed graphically. A procedure for the ranking of the successful processes based on cost is under development. The systematic selection procedure lends itself well to computer implementation. A database of manufacturing processes and an advanced user interface thus provide ideal support for designers. Cambridge Materials Selector (CMS) software is currently being applied to manufacturing process selection.