Who Creates Assembly Drawings?

[fogleghorn]

Our company produces analytical instruments. Each instrument typically has a cabinet made out of painted sheetmetal, a printed circuit board card cage assembly with a mother board, a power supply assembly, and some type of analysis module assembly. 3D models of these sub-assemblies as well as the final assembly are created in our CAD package. Step-by-step exploded assembly drawings are created for each of the sub-assemblies as well as the final assembly by the mechanical engineers; sometimes with the help of a draftsman. Creating these drawings can be quite time consuming. There is a push from the Director of Engineering to get the manufacturing engineers to work with the draftsman to get the assembly drawings created in order to free up the mechanical engineers to work on new designs. I was wondering if anyone else out there had tried this scenario; and I am particularly interested in what worked well and what didn't.

 

[KENAT]

Drawoh I too have to slightly disagree on this one and side with ewh.

I do as MM and ewh point out think that Manufacturing should have input before the design is finalized, in fact isn't this part of "concurrent engineering" or whatever the new buzzword is. Both formally at Design reviews/Phase gates and drawing/design approval and informally, when a design engineer goes to ask manufacturingengineer questions and vice versa.

I do not believe it's fundamentally design's job to fully document how something is built, but they should ensure that what they've designed can be built.

This is especially the case when the people doing the design are relatively 'expensive resources' with high qualifications etc. I've found that to be a good manufacturing 'engineer' you don't necessarily need a Masters etc, common sense, a quick mind and having spent some time on the floor is probably more useful.

While I believe these are generally 2 different roles depending on size of company etc. if may be that design helps perform some of these functions or vice versa. As 'design' engineers, refusing to help create the odd work instruction etc. may be a career limiting decision!

KENAT, probably the least qualified checker you'll ever meet...