This study analyzes the relationship between design parameters established at the initial stage of the design process and the manufacturing quality problems that manifest themselves during production. Specifically, we study the relationship between design features and the occurrence of misalignment defects and fastener related problems.

This outcome of this work is a methodology, Design for Quality Manufacturability (DFQM). DFQM addresses the likelihood that defects will occur during the manufacture of a product in a standard plant. This is based on the premise that defects in assembled products are often influenced by some features of the design and/or assembly process. These are referred to as 'Factor Variables' and they catalyze defects in certain combinations by promoting error catalysts.

The error catalysts that could cause misalignrnents or fastener related problems are identified and documented. Also, in order that the analysis of functional & positional relationships between various parts and fastener parameters can be effectively utilized in the methodology, matrices are created to represent these relationships and parameters. The error catalysis graphs provide us with numbers representing likelihood of the occurrence of misalignments/fastener related problems which are then analyzed to obtain the QM score for the design.