On March 2, a knowledge circle for the field of Manufacturing Engineering took place within the innovation cluster Drachten. During the previous meeting at Philips, it was agreed that we will organize the knowledge circle alternately at the different companies in the network, where different topics will be discussed. This time the meeting was held at Neopost Technologies in Drachten. There was a good turnout with delegates from Photonis, Delta Instruments, BD Kiestra, Neopost and Variass.

The main theme of the afternoon was 'Design for Assembly'. First, all participants were introduced to the Neopost factory and products during a guided tour. Attention was paid to the parts production department, the pre-assembly cells, the high-speed line and the latest product, the cvp500. This was followed by a presentation about industrialization at Neopost and how the industrialization team can influence the design during the project phases. It also discussed how Neopost uses the product lifecycle management system WindChill and related tools to manage new products and changes. At the moment Neopost is working hard to associate the R&D engineering bomb with a manufacturing bomb. It is possible to set up a completely different structure of a product for R&D and the factory(s), whereby it is visually visible where a change in the R&D bomb affects the manufacturing bomb.

This was followed by an interesting presentation by Fred Hettinga about the methodology he uses to realize Design for Assembly. The common thread in this story was the DFA sheet that can be filled in during reviews to test whether a design meets the requirements for DFA. Finally, Fred showed us how Neopost creates mounting instructions based on the Creo Illustrate package that uses the associatively linked bomb from the PLM package. By using this package and an associatively linked bomb, it is immediately visible which changes must be made to the exploded views if the design and engineering bomb changes.

Next time the meeting will take place at BD Kiestra and the layout of the factory will be discussed, among other things.