Infrastructure for Design for Manufacturing (DFM) Analysis

How explicitly business rules and processes are documented

• Manufacturing process capability tables (minimum wall thickness, draft angle requirements, tool access envelopes per process) must be formally encoded as structured rule sets, not narrative design guidelines
• Process selection criteria linking design feature types to eligible manufacturing processes must be documented and versioned before DFM rules can be applied consistently

Whether systems share data bidirectionally

• CAD geometry must be accessible via a programmatic interface that allows feature extraction (holes, ribs, undercuts, draft angles) without manual analyst interpretation

How data is organized into queryable, relational formats

• DFM finding categories and severity classifications must be defined in a shared taxonomy so that outputs are actionable and comparable across designs

Whether operational knowledge is systematically recorded

• Historical DFM findings linked to actual manufacturing defects or rework events must be captured to validate rule accuracy and support model improvement

Whether systems expose data through programmatic interfaces

• DFM analysis results must be accessible to designers at the point of modeling, not only to manufacturing engineers after design release

How frequently and reliably information is kept current

• DFM rule sets must be updated when new manufacturing processes are qualified or when systematic rework patterns are identified in production data