August 12, 2010 - Geometric Limited released Version 2.2 of DFMPro for Pro/ENGINEER that supports Wildfire 5.0 and Windows 7. DFMPro is a novel, automated design for manufacturing (DFM) review tool, that facilitates upstream manufacturability validation and identification of areas in design that are difficult, expensive or impossible to manufacture. It allows quick and in-depth examination of product manufacturability through advanced design rules for manufacturing processes like milling, drilling, turning, sheet metal fabrication, and injection molding.
Version 2.2 of DFMPro for Pro/ENGINEER improves the scope and ease of automated manufacturability analysis with the following new features:
- The new Injection Molding rules include checks for adequate hole spacing, appropriate drafts and fillet radii for ribs, boss height, and OD/ID ratio, among others.
- A new functionality, to export and import analysis results, allows users to save the DFMPro analysis, and view it at their convenience; and also to share the analysis results with other DFMPro users.
- The batch mode of DFMPro includes support to generate the exported results – An automated system directly emails the results for further analysis and action.
- Advanced report generation functionality with 3D interactivity - This report can be shared with other users for further review and additional collaboration.
These have been derived from well-known industry-accepted best practices.
Users can directly view the results without re-executing DFMPro analysis.
Organizations can further reduce their design-manufacturing iterations by adopting the newly provided injection molding rules. The export-import functionality combined with the batch mode operation helps CAD administrators deploy DFMPro as an offline manufacturability analysis tool, reporting problems (failed analysis results) to users as and when they occur. Users can directly open the analysis results, correct and recheck-in the designs. These features help bring in additional discipline and provide productivity improvements for DFM initiatives of an organization.
Some benefits of DFMPro include:
- Facilitates early detection and rectification of design problems affecting manufacturing
- Automates the manufacturability review process
- Allows easier and faster collaboration on manufacturability of designs
- Reduces repetitive design iterations and ‘Engineering Change’ requests by taking into account manufacturing considerations during design
- Enables manufacturability knowledge capture and reuse with its scalable framework