Ullman Sails Carefully Planned ExpansionFrom Design to Build to Customer SatisfactionThu, 23rd Apr 2009By Chuck Skewes  At Ullman Sails we have been growing at an alarming rate due to our high quality and superior designs. We have been using two popular and the best practices for achieving product quality. The first is Design for Manufacturing (DFM) and second is Design for Assembly (DFA). Together they are referred to as DFMA. These best practices give our designers a structure for considering the downstream costs and high quality of the materials and sails they design. This began with a discussion of the sources of quality in our products. It emphasizes design best practices that can lead to quality products while minimizing errors and time to manufacture. This is part of our quality product design program. Our worldwide testing program and a structured design and test evaluation system has been developed to streamline the time from testing to market. Evidence of this is our CAL (Custom Axis Laminate) and Fiberpath sails that we brought to market 2 and 4 years ago respectively. This has been a huge success for the performance cruiser to Grand Prix racer. Ullman Sails is also the exclusive user of the SOS sail service tracking software that tracks the sails from the customer through the service and delivery. SOS also keeps the information from each customer so that it can be queried in the future. The sail design software Ullman Sails is now using is the Azure Project. This is a comprehensive program that allows stress analyzing, load path stringing and very detailed rules checks to maximize the advantage of each sail. We can model sails for like type boats and apply what we learn over the entire range of boats. Dave Ullman and Yancy Smith have been instrumental in the recent improvements in this software. This article was posted on Thu, 23rd Apr 2009 |
