Designing for assembly quality: strategies, guidelines and techniques

Component design decisions and choice of assembly technology ultimately impact on the final quality of a product. Problems may arise when a component's design puts limits on the technical performance of an assembly operation. Recently, efforts have been focused on predicting component quality levels through variability and process capability measures at the design stage, but the variability associated with assembly operations is rarely considered in the context of quality. This paper reviews the current assembly-orientated design techniques available to detect potential quality problems and identifies the key issues relating to assembly quality, including the relationship between the components, operations and assembly technologies used. An approach is presented for highlighting potential assembly variability problems early in the design process and its application is demonstrated through the use of an industrial case study.