VARIATION MANAGEMENT IN PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT AND MANUFACTURING PROCESSES

The paper explains how variation can be managed in the product development phase and throughout the manufacturing processes. As product part numbers and complexity boost, research and design engineers have found it convenient to manage product development by design for manufacturing methodology, successfully applying methods and software tools for design optimization. This is only an idealistic model, because in reality, in the manufacturing layers, the engineers must face from numerous sources of variability in process inputs (i.e. man, machine tool and environment, method, measurement and material). For designers, many software tools are offered for manufacturing simulation and process validation. At the moment many solutions exist, but nothing was done for the variation management. This paper presents an expert system approach for the variation management.