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Westinghouse Recognized for “Should-Cost” Methods

Wins Boothroyd Dewhurst, Inc. Supporter of the Year Award at 2012 DFMA Forum

WAKEFIELD, R.I., USA, July 24, 2012 – Westinghouse Electric Company received the “Distinguished DFMA Supporter of the Year Award” at the 2012 International Forum on Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DFMA®) held in Providence, RI. Global Director of Supplier Manufacturing and Value Engineering (SM&VE) Steven King accepted the award on behalf of the global Westinghouse SM&VE team.

“The vision, discipline and results shown by Westinghouse in closely coupling Value Engineering with DFMA are exceptional,” says John Gilligan, President of Boothroyd Dewhurst, Inc. “The efforts of the SM&VE team made a significant impact for their company and its customers in a short amount of time. They have provided others with a textbook example for managing change and continuous improvement.”

Launched in 2010, with a mandate to expand the role of VE into analytical costing, the SM&VE group used DFMA software and methods to more effectively gauge product cost and complexity beginning as early as the conceptual stage of design.

The DFMA award has been given since 1993 for implementation success and for educating the engineering community about the role that the methods play in creating highly competitive products.

Other results from companies and experts presenting at the Forum include:

• Bill Devenish and Kevin Marett helped PCB-Larson Davis, an acoustics and vibration instrument company, beat aggressive 75 percent cost-reduction targets using DFMA tools and techniques.
• Dynisco reported seven-figure savings just this year from its integrated Lean, Value Engineering, DFMA and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) program. In the case of a housing assembly, designed initially by a contract firm, redesign efforts at Dynisco dropped part count from 62 to one.
• Bill Cleary of Westinghouse Electric Company reported that, by combining Value Engineering with DFMA, their teams were able to reduce part count for the Spider nuclear fuel assembly from 41 components to 2, while achieving stringent requirements for quality, performance and durability.
• Rob Cole of Sonoco Protective Solutions (formerly Tegrant Corporation; Protexic Brands) identified reductions of 70 percent in housing parts and 90 percent in disassembly time for a computer workstation incorporating expanded polypropylene (EPP) materials. This DFMA-driven Electronic Packaging Assembly Concept (E-PAC) replaces the traditional PC chassis.
• Harry Moser of the Reshoring Initiative outlined the need for TCO analysis and spoke of successes to date. According to Moser at least 50,000 manufacturing jobs have been reshored, which is 10 percent of the 495,000 manufacturing jobs added since the low in January 2010.
• Whirlpool has introduced an enterprise system, with support from Convergence Data Services, to track and distribute DFMA and company cost models rapidly to its global departments. Whirlpool’s Competitive Cost Analysis (CCA) group is now comprised of 62 cost-engineering specialists who aid in benchmarking and competitive analysis.
• Motorola Solutions global design centers have rolled out the Boothroyd Dewhurst DFA Index of efficiency to score past Best-in-Class product families against new products in development. The benchmarking program identifies opportunities for product simplification and excellence under a common metrics-based standard.

DFMA software guides engineers to assess the structural efficiency of their products and then reduce assembly cost by consolidating individual parts into elegant, multifunctional designs. Product development teams can examine competing materials and processes and quantitatively judge the cost trade-offs of producing new designs or improving existing products.

For more information about the 2013 DFMA Forum go to: http://www.dfma.com/forum

About Boothroyd Dewhurst, Inc.

Boothroyd Dewhurst, Inc. was the first company to commercialize Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DFMA) methodologies and software tools, which make it possible to evaluate, estimate, and reduce the manufacturing cost of a product in the design phase through product simplification and cost estimation. Hundreds of Fortune 1000 companies, including Dell, John Deere, Boeing and Whirlpool, use DFMA to cut the costs of their manufactured products and achieve design innovation in their markets. The company was founded in 1983 and received the National Medal of Technology Award in 1991. For more information about DFMA software, workshops, consulting services, and international conferences, contact Boothroyd Dewhurst, Inc., 138 Main Street, Wakefield, R.I. 02879, USA. Tel. (401) 783-5840. Fax (401) 783-6872. Web site: www.dfma.com. E-mail: info@dfma.com.

DFMA is a registered trademark of Boothroyd Dewhurst, Inc.