Part IV. Designing for producibility: Manufacturing and design: A symbiosis: If robots and other advanced assembly methods are to be used efficiently, products must be scrutinized in terms of manufacturability early in the design cycle

Not so long ago a product´s designers seldom worried about how it would have to be built. Automation engineers took the new design and did their best to devise an assembly method, either by hand or by machine. Manufacturers tried where they could to use inexpensive parts and to push them into assembly as fast as possible. The result: problems arising out of the design or fabrication, or caused by parts being out of tolerance, had to be solved by the assembler´s ingenuity — usually in undocumented and unappreciated ways.