Manufacturability and Producibility

Manufacturability and Producibility is an engineering specialty. The machines and processes used to build a system must be architected and designed. Manufacturing equipment and processes can sometimes cost more than the system being built, and so a systems engineering approach to manufacturing and production is necessary (Maier and Rechtin 2002).

The system being built might be a one-of-a-kind, or it might be intended to be reproduced multiple times. The manufacturing system is different for each of these situations and is tied to the type of system being built. For example, the manufacture of a single board computer would be vastly different from the manufacture of an automobile.

Production involves the repeated building of the designed system. Multiple production cycles require the consideration of production machine maintenance and downtime. Manufacturing and Production engineering involves similar systems engineering processes specifically tailored to the building of the system.

Manufacturability and produceibility are the key attributes of a system that determine the ease of manufacturing and production. While manufacturability is simply the ease of manufacture, producibility also encompasses other dimensions of the production task, including packaging and shipping. Both these attributes can be improved by incorporating proper design decisions that take into account the entire system life cycle (Blanchard and Fabrycky 2005). See Table 25 for a list of manufacturing and production elements.

References

Citations

Maier, M., and E. Rechtin. 2002. The art of systems architecting. 2nd ed. Boca Raton, FL, USA: CRC Press.

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--Bkcase 19:10, 22 August 2011 (UTC) (on behalf of Dick Fairley)