Industrial Engineering Knowledge Center: Additive Manufacturing of Fixtures

Saturday, May 15, 2021

Additive Manufacturing of Fixtures - Productivity Benefits

Case Study 6 of Industrial Engineering ONLINE Course - Main Page
Industrial Engineering Case Studies Collection

Industrial engineers have to be on the look out for identifying opportunities for reducing cost within their organization's engineering processes. One way of systematically exploring the opportunities in a process is process industrial engineering study using operation process chart and flow process charts.

Productivity improvement of engineering processes and operation is done through redesign of engineering elements: machine effort elements and human effort elements.

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What are typical machine elements? You can understand it from the popular subject, "Design of Machine Elements." Cutting tools are elements in machining and machine tool. Even angles of cutting tools are elements. Even insert shape is an element. Industrial engineers have to go down to the lowest level to seek productivity improvement opportunities and modify every element where improvement is possible.

In the study of value adding operations and inspection operations there is machine work study and operator work study. In value engineering Miles proposed a basic step: that is identifying the function of a part or a feature of a part and then coming out with alternative ways of fulfilling the required function reliably. In addition to the basic step, he also gave 13 additional techniques to identify improvement opportunities. Similar approach has to be followed in process industrial engineering. Whenever, industrial engineers come across a story of productivity improvement in various engineering and management magazines and journals, and business papers, they have to make note of it, file it appropriately and study the related aspects and examine its applicability to the operations in their organization processes. They have to inform the news item to all the persons in their department as well as related persons in their company so that more people explore the topic. Knowledge management is essential for effective industrial engineering.

Cost Reduction through Printing Fixtures through FDP Process

2017

Digi International uses fixtures with integrated masks in a conformal coating process that eliminate the need for taping parts, saving about $123,750 for a typical production run.

Digi originally purchased an additive manufacturing machine for producing prototypes but quickly found that it also substantially reduced the cost required to build hybrid carrier and masking fixtures. CPI Aero reduced the time required to produce inspection fixtures from 40 days to 3 days and the cost of four sets of eight templates for a typical assembly from $29,541.20 to $1,108 by making them with additive manufacturing.

Genesis Systems reduced the cost of making EOAT by 94% with additive manufacturing, reduced lead time from 30 days to 3 days and cut the weight of the tooling from 15.9 kg to 1.4 kg, which made it possible to use smaller, less expensive robots.

All the companies cited above are using FDM for printing jigs.