Decision-based process design for shortening the lead time for mold design and production

We propose “Decision-based process design” for reducing the process time of the design and production of molds. This method reviews the human processes of making decisions for setting unknown parameters, and reduces their process time by actively reducing the operations with such decisions. We applied decision-based process design to the design and production of injection molding cellular phone shells, together with 3D-CAD and high speed machining. The application reduced the number of decision operations to 77, 13% of the total number of operations, and drastically decreased the process time by 86% down to 50 hours.