Improving Design for Manufacturing implementation in knowledge intensive collaborative environments: An analysis of organisational factors in aerospace manufacturing

Today, the manufacturing industry is under increasing pressure to rapidly develop and manufacture innovative designs in much shorter timeframes in order to keep up with growing customer demands and quickly gain new business. Implementing Design for Manufacturing (DFM) methods can help achieve this by integrating manufacturing knowledge into the design process early in the product development phase. This can prevent potentially known manufacturing defects from occurring and save costs associated with late design changes. The management of this process in complex manufacturing environments is very challenging as it requires constant structuring and feedback of data from production to the engineering teams. This investigation focuses on how the communication of manufacturing knowledge from the production data can be hindered by factors within the overall organization. The findings confirm that using tools to manage knowledge needs to be combined with addressing the existing communication barriers in order to enable a more effective DFM feedback to the engineers. This investigation considers the influence of organizational factors on the communication of engineering knowledge in a large UK-based aerospace manufacturing company, presents the findings, then followed by discussions for improving DFM Knowledge Management in the Aerospace Industry.