(Figure and Section numbers refer to the author's 2020 DFM book)

The featured article in the November 2013 in Mechanical Engineering (the journal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers), titled “Why Manufacturing Matters,” concludes that scalability leads to the fastest market leadership and highest profits:

“The companies that scale the latest technologies the fastest
 will become the market leaders and reap most of the profit.”

The ASME article also says that scalability of innovation is the key to market leadership:

“Firms that scale and deploy innovations rapidly
will remain market leaders.”

 The Value   of   Scalability

Being able to design scalable products and scale up production quickly is the foundation for:

• Rapid ramps to stable production, which most of the articles on this site show how to do.

• Be able to easily deal with surges in product demand, which can be caused by sudden sales surges from good publicity, advertising, promotions, or simply that the product is a surprise hit.

• Be able to quickly replace obsolete and problem products or modules (Section 4.9) because of bad performance, quality, or publicity,  recalls, sudden appearance of better rival products, etc.

• Cope with supply chain shortages, which can be avoided by designing  for availability (Section 5.19.2) which is helped by Standardization  5) and automatic resupply techniques (Section 4.2.1).

• Quickly producing emergency replacement demands from natural disasters.

• Rapidly scaling up new products for very large new markets such as widespread solutions to energy and climate challenges.

• Growth without limits.

Scalability  Product Development Principles 

Use Design for manufacturability during manufacturable research and product design principles  (covered in most of this site)  to ensure that products will be able to quickly and cost-effectively scaled up. Here are the scalability principles:

Avoiding Complexity

First question the complexity: ask:

 Is the status quo concept based on the usual lab procedures or highly skilled operators? built with unnecessarily tight tolerances?

Understand all the costs, delays, and effects on Scalability, regarding:

Manual operations, which may not be possible at scale because of cost, quality risks, ,skill demands, worker availability, and worker distancing constraints. Although, even if none of those concerns are important, manual labor may need to be versatile with enough breadth of equipment.

- Automation may alleviate skill demands, worker availability, quality vulnerabilities, and cost-per-operation may be low in  high volume with no variety. However, the investment may be high. Further mass production is not good at handing variety or disruption.  With enough concentrated volume, an automated line or machine could be dedicated for each version, or batches could be changed over for inventory.  The final irony is that, if the whole industry is trying to scale up, and there may be a shortage of specialized automation machines.

Look for Simplicity:

- Are there any inherently simpler concepts? Look for:

- Simple developed concepts a may be available Off-the-Shelf  parts, discussed in Section 5.18 of the DFM book

Off-the-shelf parts with wide-spread use will scale better, especially those that conform to standard sizes, mounts, and common specs.

Search broadly using the techniques of Figure 5.6 in in the DFM book.

- Theoretically promising technologies could be commercialized, as specified in the Section 3.10 in the DFM book or web article on commercialization.

Use Creativity (Section 3.6) and Brainstorming (Section 3.7) to create scalable designs that satisfy all of the principles of book Section 3.3.11 on Concept Simplification

Ensure    Availability  of Parts & Materials

Proactively select parts and materials for assured availability for the life of the product at the highest possible production volumes. This includes avoiding:

• Avoid quickly nard-to-get parts from industries that have shorter llfe-spans, lower quality demands, and obsolescence measured in months, not years. Obsessive pressure on the cost of BOM line items may cause this. This can be countered by the many ways DFM can lower many categories of cost.

• Potentially scarce parts, including any that may have to compete with other application that may also be scaling up, for instance, for widespread conversion to renewable sources of energy, electric battery production capacity would be best allocated to electric cars and roof top Photo-Voltaic panels, instead of storing energy at wind power and solar PV fields, both of which have better and cheaper alternatives (pumping water up for hydraulic storage for wind and Concentrated Solar Power (with heat storage).

• Rare Earth elements, which, when available, may provide the best efficiencies, function, or compactness, for instance, the lightest and smallest motor magnets.
        However, scalable design principles would recommend generating "plan B" contingencies, like providing enough space and weight allocation for their non-rare-Earth-element magnets.

• Risky Parts should have ample “plan B” replacement available and, if the placement parts are bigger, there must be enough space for the replacements. For instance, lithium-ion batteries are the most space-efficient batteries, but engineers must allow enough space for the large replacements.

• Performance premiums. Avoid excessively expensive components that may cost a high premium for the last few percent of efficiency if this results in a much higher part cost and be harder to find, just to try for a slight increase in sales. Rather. the company can use the principles of this site to cut 9 categories of cost from half to 1/10 of the usual cost

Instead, scale products around standard proven off-the-shelf parts (Section 5.18  of the DFM book ) and modules that are selected to be readily available throughout the anticipated life-span of the product. Avoid dependence on parts that are hard to get, have long lead-times, incur high inventory carrying costs, or may become unavailable within the life-span of the product.

Scalability can be immediately improved by 
expanding your sources of supply by qualifying  more suppliers right now 
beyond your current supplier "part numbers."  

 

How to Avoid Running Out of medical Ingredients, Reagents, & Consumables
(new for 2021)

To be able to scale into the millions, or eve hundreds  of millions, design your products around readily available ingredients, reagents, and consumables.

First try generics, which will probably have the best availability from multiple sources.  Plus, generics always cost less.

If  initial searches seem  disappointing,  then  broaden the search to include  "better" or slightly more expensive results, as recommended in the "how to search" section ( 5.19.1) in all DFM book editions.

Commercialization your products. If some aspects of your existing products, research, patents, or acquired technology are blocking scalability, they may need to be  commercialized to preserve the "crown jewels" and re-design the rest for scalability and, as a bonus, for manufacturability, which will save so much cost, it will enable broadening your searches, as recommended above.

Fortunately, for chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and medical products, the vast majority of ingredients and reagents are not likely to be  part of the crown jewels,  so they can be replaced with versions that will be more scalable, using the criteria presented herein.

Scalability can be immediately improved by expanding your sources of supply by qualifying  more suppliers right now beyond your current supplier "part numbers."  

 

Scalability  for Regulated Product    (new for 2021

Don’t risk having to change a regulated product for availability

The same  logic applies to  any products that were hard to get to work just right every time in the product is built.

Scalability for certified products.  This section is for pharmaceuticals, emergency medicines,  testers, r medical products, food, essential nutrients and vitamins in addition to  aerospace, defense, automobiles, and any products regulated for all forms of public  safety.

All regulated produces must avoid any possibilities of needing to go through the cost, efforts, and calendar delays of re-certifications for trying to:

• Replace anything that is not be available enough
  
• Replace anything that is unsuitable for any customers or users that may become apparent when scaling up
  
• Find substitutes or supplements for processing equipment needed for capacity.  Note that changing to a different, or even an improved, process  may require a re-certification.  Some semiconductor manufacturers have instituted a "copy exact" policy for all additional processing   equipment coming into a "fab."
  
• Replace parts, materials, or ingredients with cheaper versions to try to "save cost," which is discouraged in most articles on this site and most editions of the DFM book, especially Figure 1.2.

Regulator caveat: Even if you and your supplier claim that these replacements are "equivalent," it will not be allowed unless the regulator deems them to be  equivalent.

Re-certification strategy.  If your product needs to be re-certified for any reason, then other replacements and changes can be included as long if they don't cause any new problems of delays. However, if the replacements are, in fact, equivalent, that may not be a problem.  So everyone on the whole project needs to know this is coming up and contribute all their inputs.

    Manufacturability  caveat:  Don't open the flood gates and allow practices counter to  good manufacturability, like changing to "cheap parts" in a futile attempt to "save cost," which may work enough now to pass a re-certification test, but may fail or run out of some supplies later.

Proactively doing  everything to assure scalability may appear to raise a few BOM entries for part cost, but following all scalability principles will save much ore in total cost, especially if any  counter-productive  actions cause product problems or force a re-certification (coming up below).

Scalability can be immediately improved by expanding your sources of supply by qualifying  more suppliers right now beyond your current supplier "part numbers."  

 

Criteria for selection for scalability

For all potential candidates, investigate  rank the following:

• current sales volume per year for whatever is close to your needs
• potential for future scalability: rank using the principles of this site; a good sign would be having plans, or, at least studying articles (like this one) or books on scalability, like Section 4.8 in the 2020 DFM book
• Projections  for competitive demand or other potential users
• Identify  suppliers that service multiple markets, especially markets whose demands are out of phase from yours.
• rank the number and size of manufacturers making what you need
• business model compatibility: mass production vs flexible Build-to-Order; ERP ordering  built for inventory vs  spontaneous pull signals;  susceptibility to bottle-necks to scalability [in a forthcoming section]

 

Scalability and Concept/Architecture

Architecture must be also structured so that scalability is never limited by shortages of all consumables needed by the product in operation.

•  The best architecture for scalability would not need any consumables at all, and if this is important, then research efforts should start by  finding or devising that, being sure to justify it with  total cost     Total cost may be needed to justify using a long-lived , readily available catalyst to eliminate consumables. 
  
•  If really needed, the whole product system should be designed around immediately available consumables e with inexhaustible supplies at low cost.

• Don't lock the design into a proprietary source that is not interchangeable with industry standards.  Beware of proprietary "standards" or special packaging that try to limited customer choice -and availability - like razors and printer cartridges 
•  

Bottle-necks to Scalability and How to Avoid Them (new for 2021) 

"Theory of Constraints,"  made famous by textbooks and even a novel by Eli Goldratt, strives to eliminate bottle-necks, which can be a serious block to scalability.  

The usual cause is a strategy based on "efficiency," which leads companies to buy bigger "more efficiency" machines with the measure of efficiency being the utilization rate, which is highest for mass production making identical products.  However, there are not many Model T plants that hove no variety. see tee the article about the end of Mass Production: End of the Line for Mass Production; No Time for Batches and Queues-.

Now days, variety is inevitable and maximum efficiency and utilization are hard to maintain because it takes too long to change- over from one batch to another batch.  so, in order to drive up the metrics,  the setup  cost and time are amortized  over larger batches and put into inventory.  This keeps the machine busy, thus raising up the utilization  rate up by keeping busy building products that no one ordered.

Of course, this will not scale up because these mega-machines are hard enough to justify as it is, and buying to scale will difficult to do and  even harder to justify.

 

Bottle-necks can be eliminated by not concentrating production into a mega-machines, which are hard to scale.  Instead, use multiple ordinary machine tools that are:

1)   widespread availability, even around the world

2)  low cost and easy to use and program

-3) can be easily be make flexible using the principles found in the author's 520 page BTO book described at the page on books at (build-to-order-consulting.com) and illustrated at:  Flex-Mfg (build-to-order-consulting.com)-.  and thus.

4) they will be easy o scale, virtually without limit.

The Goal

All of these problems and solutions are worked into the Goldratt's novel, "The Goal" is about  a factory with a mega-machine that was making "good numbers" on its utilization metric, but the plant was about to close because it we so unprofitable (the real goal).

So the solution implemented in the engaging novel was going to "the bone pile" of used, "obsolete" machine tools  and assembled them into "right sized" lines. This will be scalable.  

Importance  to scalability of  Designing  Products  for  Manufacturability

On  the opening slide of the author's classes for the last 15 years,  the third definition of DFM says that good DFM will “ensure that lack of manufacturability "doesn't make it difficult to respond to unexpected surges in product demand or limit growth.” At this point, the author asks every class, "How long would it take you do double production,"  The answers range from "6 months to never!"

        Scalability, like manufacturability itself, must be designed into the product or a deficient product will be hard to manufacture and hard to scale rapidly. Therefore, scalability must be a key design goal if companies are going to want the ability to scale up product levels rapidly and grow fast. If very high growth rates are possible, then scalability may need to be a primary design consideration

        Any product only designed for functionality will be hard to manufacture and be hard to scale. For any industry that may have the possibility of rapid growth, products must be well designed for scalability.

        Products not designed for scalability can not be “made scalable” any more then unmanufacturable products can be “cost reduced” as shown in in the article 7 reasons why you can't reduce cost after design. 

In fact, cost reduction after design usually substitutes  cheaper parts,
which not only doesn't reduce total cost,
but also worsens availability, which then worsens scalability.

    If any products have promising technology, but were not design for manufacturability, they will have to be commercialized  to make them both manufacturable and scalable.

Products that start with research will have to practice the principles of manufacturable research early, as taught in Section 3.9.

 

Product Not to Try to Scale

Companies should not try to scale up products that have not been well designed for scalability, as shown in the following sub-sections.

“Avoid the “economy of scale” fallacy that once you raise the production volume, the cost automatically goes down.”

Unfortunately, industrial legends have misled small companies into thinking that this could benefit anyone. However, they need to realize that mass production giants had enormous volumes with no variety, which meant they could invest in massive hard tooling, no setup changes, and specialization of labor.

Today, variety is valuable, volumes are much less, and mass production is being replaced by Mass Customization (Section 4.3), and build-to-forecast has been replaced by Build-to-Order (Section 4.2), all of which can be designed to be scalable, which this section shows how to do.

This book strongly recommends that any products possibly in line for large-scale scaling up become ready for either of these scenarios:

1. Existing products must be thoroughly commercialized, which may involve redesign for manufacturability and scalability, as specified in Section 4.8.

2. New products must be designed for widespread scalability by following all the manufacturable research principles presented in Section 3.9 and concurrently designed for manufacturability as presented in the rest of this book while being design for scalability.

Similarly, if a company’s sales force accepts a tempting large order that is not scalable, the whole operation may struggle with:

•Availability problems like nowhere near enough parts and materials available in time to fulfill the accepted order.

•Inadequate fixtures, tooling, and processing equipment, for the increased demand that should have been concurrently engineered.

•Unnecessarily tight tolerances that raise part cost, create too much demand on precision machine tools, or require too much skilled labor.

•Inadequate vendor/partners that cannot meet the increased demand either.

•Too much firefighting to solve manufacturability, quality, or ramping issues.

Unfortunately, all these problems will drain valuable resources away from designing products for manufacturability and scalability.

So until all products are designed well for manufacturability, those that are not should rationalized away, as recommended in Appendix A.

 

Importance  of  Product  Platform Strategy  to  Scalability

Overview  of  Product  Family  Synergies

Design product in synergistic product families that are versatile enough to quickly adapt to volatile demand variations within the platform family. Even if the foundation aspects of platform are somewhat standard, those aspects will be easier to scale than many mass production products.  If the variations are built to-order, they could be built on-demand without setup or inventory.  See Section 4.7 in 2020 DFM book, which is based on the author’s book," Build-to-Order & Mass Customization," which is also described on that page.

 

How  to  Structure  and Build  Platform  Families  for  Scalability

If you have any variety of product configurations or if they are subject to change, then you must structure your configurations into families, which will help your business model in many ways, including scalability of the entire family. See how to implement the "disruptively" competitive methodologies  in Section 4.7 in the 2020 edition of the DFM book.

Instead  of dealing with several discrete product variations that scale differently (which can change independently  over time), Section 4.7 will show how to scale whole families together,- even if they are evolving.    Here are three examples:

Production equipment  can be concurrently engineered to be able to adapt as product or its manufacture has to adapt.  This would use Mass Customization principles , as also in the next example.

Personalized  Medicine.  The ultimate example of mass customized platforms is personalized cures for cancer.  Each patient submits unique input to a flexible process that creates the ideal "marker" that triggers the body's immune systems to go after the cancerous cells. Dr. Anderson provided expertise for manufacturing strategies and flexible processing equipment. 

Testers.  Another potential of mass customized platforms is testers should be to concurrently engineered  versatile testers that can adapt the tests as the specimens adapt.

 

Responsibilities for Scalability

Research groups (the "R" in R&D) would structure the family with versatile, coherent processing that can use the three ways to customize in the Mass Customization article:

• - be programmed to adapt
• - be adjusted to adapt
• - connect to  modules for specialized needs

Development teams  (the "D" in R&D0 would design versatile products and equipment based on Research's structuring.  Of  course, Research and Development must work early together to pull this off.  And sending research out for bids is simply out of the question.

Scalable  Labor  Force  and  Partners

Here are DFM principles that can make labor more scalable regarding:

• Skill demands. These can be greatly minimized in the Research phase as discussed in the matching section in the Manufacturable Research page.

• Firedrills. Scalable products should be designed for quick and easy manufacture without the need for firedrills, “tribal lore,” scarce resources, and skill and judgment. all of which make production hard to scale up production volumes because of the difficulty finding and training these resources.

• Scalable Vendor/Partners. Scalable products have custom parts built by vendor/partners who help the OEM to design their parts for manufacturability, quality, and fast ramps on widely available machine tools  from widely available materials on flexible tooling that avoids setup delays.
 

Equipment   Availability   and   Expandability

Scalable products should be built on concurrently engineered production equipment and tooling suitable for initial demand and be easily scalable to the highest anticipated demand.

• Avoid scarce production equipment. Avoid dependence on scarce production equipment capacity for hard-to-build parts that can not be build on ordinary machine tools, for instance, large weldments that must be machined after welding on scarce mega-machine tools. The scalable alternative would be to replace large weldments with  machine tool tolerance parts that can be made on ordinary CNC machine tools and assembled rigidly and precisely using DFM techniques  at the steel/cost reduction workshop.

• Design to maximize use of  existing machine shops that have adequate capacity.  For massive scalability projects utilize general purpose CNC machine tools in the 21,200 machine shops in the United States alone!

• Avoid hard-to-expand production equipment. Be cautious if your supply chain depends on "fabs" that cost billions and take years to build, which may be hard to scale quickly. At the individual part level, do not base designs on parts whose availability is limited by limited capacity production capabilities, like electronic parts. semiconductor devises, and Photo-Voltaic panels.

 

Utilizing L  lean   Production   to   Shift   Production   Lines 

 Equipment capacity shortages are confined to a few product line, then Lean Production can provide a solution with production lines that are versatile enough to shift production to more production lines whenever one is overwhelmed by demand. If versatile production are concurrently engineered, as taught in this section, the product line shifting can be done quickly so as not to compromise any of the other products.

This is preferable to a Mass Production changeover which takes a great deal of effort and time to remove the other product’s capacity and replaces them with the product that is having a hard time scaling.

Build-to-Order takes this further by concurrently designing versatile product lines that can build any variation in the family without any setup changes or delays.

 

 

  
Scalability   Using   Mass Customization 

Trying to scale up a variety of products can be very inefficient and thus fall way short of maximum scalability, if operating in the Mass Production mode, by building a batch of each version with calendar time and resources wasted between change-over setup between each batch.

On the other hand,  Mass Customization  can deliver the fastest scale-up of any variety because it eliminates change-over delays and the waste of machine tool time and resources.

So, if a variety of products needs maximum scalability structured into  Product Families  and built to-order in plant cell layouts from standard parts, materials, and ingredients that are pulled in so they are always available at all points of use.

Scalability   Using  Postponement

Postponement is a Mass Customization technique in which a versatile flotation part could be built ahead of time with variety built ahead knowing it will be used later one way of another. On to this foundation parts could be bolted many different postponed Varity parts, which be built ahead of time, or, preferable, built to-order on-demand.
        Another version of postponement is ordering versatile semi-finished parts in quantity and then doing specific operations on-demand, like hole drilling or machining specific optional features.

Optimizing   Production   Machinery   Capacity

Another form scalability is optimizing the size of a product, the capacity of machinery, or scope of a project.

Often, these are arbitrary choices in the product definition. However, arbitrary decisions should be avoided in product development as recommenced in Section 1.8.

The size or capacity of a product should not be based on previous products, competitive offerings, “bigger is better” thinking, or even round numbers.

Rather, ascertain what is your optimal size for the customer, keeping mind that, if your product has a large size or output, it will sell only to customers who need a large product. On the other hand, a smaller size could expand the market to customers with smaller needs and allow some customers to stock multiple small sizes for specific needs.

 

Optimizing  Scale  Strategies  with Stackable Production Equipment

Companies that can sell more scaled down products for smaller needs can also sell multiple small modules to markets with larger needs if they were designed for versatile “stacking” scenarios.
        Further ,for production equipment, Lean Production principles encourage smaller batches (down to building on-demand) which would need machines with smaller outputs used in multiple “right sized” lines that satisfy customers quickly with much less inventory

Scalability Conclusions