Concurrent design and manufacturing: an approach for the injection mould industry

The market globalization forces, especially for small and medium sized enterprises, the adoption of innovative methodologies and techniques to respond at ever changing customer requirements. In fact increased product diversities, smaller lot-sizes, shorter product life cycles and shorter time to market put an enormous pressure on company processes, involving all organization departments (design, manufacturing, logistics, etc.). Methods that allow a concurrent design and manufacturing of a product can have a significant impact on the solution of such problems. In this context the paper presents an application of a DFM methodology to optimize the development process of a specific mechanical product (moulds for shoe soles). In particular, the aim of the research is the study of an integrated design system to manage automatically all the product development phases (prototype digitalization, CAD modeling, tool-paths generation). In this work will be described the low-cost design software developed to facilitate the design task considering in the early phases all manufacturing constraints.