Design for Manufacturing : 3 cardinal rules for industrializing your circuit boards under the best condition

What is Design for Manufacturing, or “DfM” ?

This support solution, offered at the same time as the product development cycle, is designed to facilitate and improve the reliability of every stage of industrialization before mass-producing electronics assemblies.

DfM comes into play upstream of the product life cycle. Ideally, it should be implemented before the design phase of an electronic product, throughout the prototyping and pre-production phases, all the way through to its final production.

Rule 1 : Anticipating manufacturing and inspection constraints right from the start of the design stage

Anticipating each stage of the industrialization cycle allows for the best possible production monitoring. It involves mastering all the constraints generated by the chosen design techniques in order to quickly assess all their advantages and disadvantages.

This analysis helps identify the ideal design as early as possible, thereby optimizing production lead times, quality, and the reliability of the future product. The Design for Manufacturing service offered by LACROIX ensures a reliable production process by leveraging the extensive experience of our experts.

The impact of technical choices on production and the importance of Design for Manufacturing

Certain technical choices lead to specific manufacturing processes while excluding others, sometimes causing assembly issues or making it impossible to automate certain inspection steps. These constraints can impact costs, increase the risk of assembly defects, raise the scrap rate, or affect the overall quality and reliability of production.

It is therefore recommended to involve Design for Manufacturing experts as early as possible in the project—starting from the functional analysis phase—before making technical implementation decisions. Under these conditions, the synergy between design teams and production resources is at its best.

Conversely, if experts are brought in after this crucial stage, production processes must then be adapted to the product design. This less favorable approach typically results in additional time and costs to overcome technical challenges.

Thanks to our expertise and tools, we are able to reveal design flaws to our clients that had previously gone undetected. The artificial intelligence of the VALOR software allows us to integrate all our criteria, making it increasingly efficient. As a result, our analyses are more comprehensive, with greater automation and faster execution.

By mastering this tool, we offer our clients an optimal Design for Manufacturing service.

Grégory Vincent
Manufacturing Manager
product and DfM expert
Linkedin Nouvelle fenêtre

Rule 2: Making your product more reliable by focusing on the right partner

At LACROIX, it is the combination of our electronic production engineers’ expertise and the use of the high-performance VALOR software that enables our teams to reach their full potential.

Design for Manufacturing experts use this software as a key support tool to deepen their analyses with greater efficiency. It is a highly advanced inspection tool and a crucial interfacing software that enhances collaboration between R&D designers and product manufacturing workshops.

VALOR’s strategic advantages

VALOR not only reduces analysis execution time by relying on a set of manufacturability rules based on electronics industry standards, combined with LACROIX’s extensive manufacturing experience.

Our experts provide strategic recommendations ranging from redesigning the electronic board to suggesting the integration of specific new components. Thanks to the software, all customer constraints are instantly taken into account, making LACROIX’s recommendations even more relevant and tailored.

Rule 3: Invest at the beginning to gain throughout the product lifecycle

By adopting the principles advocated by the DfM support solution, it is possible to adjust the design of a product to facilitate its assembly, reduce the risk of defects that may appear during its use, and thus guarantee its reliability throughout its life cycle.

Some public procurement contracts apply penalties that can be very costly, depending on the initial defect rate; hence the importance of choosing the best manufacturing processes to secure production.

The Design for Manufacturing service is a cost-effective support solution that runs concurrently with the industrialization cycle. Far from weighing down processes, the experts mobilized play a facilitating role at every stage of industrialization.

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