DESIGN FOR MANUFACTURING SERVICES
Get Your Design Ready to Manufacture
What Our DFM Service Supports
Design for manufacturing involves multiple disciplines. Depending on how developed your design is, our DFM service can include a review, re-engineering, analysis, or a production readiness check. Find the one that fits.
In-House Capabilities Behind Our DFM
Design for Manufacturing Support Across Industries
The rules, the volumes, and the tolerances change from field to field. We have DFM experience supporting the following industries.
Making a Design Manufacturable Takes Multiple Disciplines
Product Development
We take the design the rest of the way and get it ready to hand to your manufacturer.
Reverse Engineering
We rebuild clean, buildable CAD from legacy parts or physical samples when the original drawings are gone.
Mechanical Design
Electronics Design
Industrial Design
Industrial Automation
Key Clients
Rhodri Armour, PhD, P.Eng.
Program Manager, Engineering Design and Discovery
Rhodri provides the expert technical oversight needed to ensure your product maintains timeline and budget. He has taken opaque ideas and confidently turned out MVPs (minimum viable product) that are ready for the next stage of development.
At any point in your product’s development, Rhodri will navigate you through the often complex path of ideation to production.
His expertise has catapulted developments in life science, food and nutrition, renewable energy, carbon sequestration and wearable tech. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Fun fact about Rhodri: He is a mechanical engineer with a PhD in biomimicry. (Ask him about his doctorate thesis – you won’t regret it.)
Case Studies Across Medical, Consumer, Industrial, Marine, and Regulated Hardware
FIVAFlow: Evolving from MVP to Global Medical Product
The Halifax-based medical device company developed FIVAFlow, a compact, clip-on IV monitoring device that measures flow, detects empty bags, and alarms clinicians before problems arise.
Scaling Up FreshrPack from Lab to Pilot Production
How Enginuity helped Freshr Technologies transform a lab-scale microgel packaging process into a budget-ready, continuous roll-to-roll pilot line for fresh protein.
Remote Product Development Revolutionizes Electronic Gaming Tables
The success of the Jackpot Digital project highlights our proficiency in delivering innovative product development, engineering design outsourcing, and quick prototyping services that can be applied across various industries.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between DFM, DFA and design for cost?
All three reduce cost, but at different stages. DFM is design for manufacturing, shaping each part with the right tolerances, material and geometry so it's cheaper and easier to make. DFA is design for assembly, cutting part count and simplifying how the pieces fit together so the product is faster to build. Design-to-cost works backward from a target price, you tell us the part needs to be $8 instead of $18, and we redesign the part until it is.
In practice they overlap, and Enginuity uses all three together, because a part that's easy to machine, easy to assemble and built to a number is what gets you to production at the price you need.
Can you help me check my design for manufacturability before I send it to a manufacturer?
Yes, our team can help you compare it to the process you intend to use, highlighting the wall thicknesses, tolerances and features that will create scrap, delays or a tool rework once it is in production. On molded parts we look at draft angles, gating, resin flow and how the part ejects, and we can run Moldflow to see how the material fills, packs and cools before any steel is cut.
You get the problems fixed before you have put money down on a manufacturer.
My manufacturer tells me they can’t make my part. Can you redesign it?
Yes. A manufacturer will reject a part for a geometry or tolerance issue their process cannot hold, and Enginuity will redesign the part so that it can be built without losing what the part needs to do.
Do you provide DFM on its own, or only as part of a manufacturing contract?
Will a DFM review delay my timeline?
Can you handle DFM on both the mechanical and the electronics?
Yes, we can. Both our electronics and mechanical engineers collaborate closely when a product is designed and built. In our experience, most DFM problems hide in the fit between mechanical parts and electronics. Working with us saves you from this headache.
What do you need from me to get going?
Your CAD in a neutral format like STEP, any drawings you have, the process you are planning to use, and a target cost or volume if you have one. We can work with less, even a physical sample and no drawings, but the more you tell us about how and where you plan to build, the better we can help you make an informed decision.
If there is no CAD, we can rebuild it from a physical part or a rough concept through reverse engineering and run DFM on that. So a legacy component with no drawings, or an idea that only exists as a sketch, is still something we can take on.
Do you sign NDAs and how do you protect our IP?
Yes, you sign an NDA before you hand us anything sensitive, and your IP stays yours. We are also Controlled Goods certified and security cleared, so we are set up to do restricted and defense-related work.
What does a DFM review include?
A DFM review compares your design to how it will be manufactured, and tells you what to change. We review material choice, material form, tolerances, wall thickness, draft, part count and the features that drive cost or cause defects in your process.
On molded parts this means draft angles, gating, resin flow, cooling and any geometry that complicates the tool or the ejection, often backed up by Moldflow simulation.