Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/255022
42 The PCB Magazine • February 2014 philosophy. The first step in Lean NPI imple- mentation is to shift the DFM validation pro- cess from the manufacturer upstream into the design process, while still using the manufac- turer's DFM rules, thus ensuring minimal engi- neering changes after hand-off to manufactur- ing. A well-known rule-of-thumb indicates that the cost of an engineering change goes down by 10x for every step of "left-shift" taken in the product lifecycle back towards the early stages. Thus, finding and fixing DFM problems during design, not afterwards in manufacturing, offers a substantial opportunity for cost and time- saving. New generations of PCB design and NPI software offer close integration of DFM analysis into the layout process, thus enabling the PCB designer to ensure that his product matches the constraints of the intended manufacturing process while he is laying out the board, not af - terwards—when the most elegant solutions to DFM problems are no longer available due to all most aspects of a product-design now being fixed and committed to. The second dimen- sion of the Lean NPI best-practice is the hand- off of a complete and well-integrated model of the product to be manufactured, such that all wasted and error-prone work to rebuild the product-model prior to process-preparation is avoided. The Lean NPI flow Running a Lean NPI process comprising DFM tools integrated into the design, coupled with the industry-proven intelligent ODB++ data, can cut engineering change orders (ECOs) in half and errors by even more—and ensure that what is manufactured is precisely what the designer intended. SMART DATA TRANSFER FORMATS AUTOMATE CAD/CAM continues Figure 2: the lean nPi Flow eliminates waste in the nPi process by ensuring a right-the-first-time philosophy. cad, nPi, dFm or cam processes must each be able to generate or input odb++ data that is complete and of maximum intelligence, with nPi functionality that can make automatic use of the integrated data content for minimal human error and maximum process-repeatability.