Company: Boothroyd Dewhurst, Inc.
Location: 138 Main St., Wakefield
Web address: www.dfma.com
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Owners: The Boothroyd and Dewhurst families
Employees: 18
Established: 1983
Annual sales: $2-3 million
With an approach to software development that’s part academic, part big business, Boothroyd Dewhurst strives to create programs to increase the cost-effectiveness of its customers.
Founded by professors Geoffrey Boothroyd, Ph.D., and Peter Dewhurst, Ph.D., Boothroyd Dewhurst develops software tools to apply manufacturing assembly knowledge to the product design process.
"I think the founders of the company set up a good work environment here," said Boothroyd Dewhurst President John Gilligan, son-in-law of founder Boothroyd. "It was a natural extension of what they were doing at the university."
The two – both originally from England – founded the company when they were professors at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1983, and relocated the company to Wakefield in 1985 when they both accepted professorships at the University of Rhode Island.
Today, Geoffrey Boothroyd is retired from URI and remains active in the company; co-founder Peter Dewhurst is still at URI and not involved in the day-to-day operations of the company, leaving those responsibilities, in part, to son Nicholas P. Dewhurst, the company’s executive vice president.
Gilligan joined the company in 1989, a time of "big growth," he said. Automotive manufacturer General Motors had just purchased the software, and "suddenly, the phone was ringing off the hook."
Dewhurst said the company’s Design For Assembly (DFA) software accounts for 60 percent of Boothroyd Dewhurst’s sales. The program enables design engineers to reduce the part count and other major cost-drivers of production by helping them answer questions regarding the properties and functions of a product’s component parts.
For example, parts that do not have to be made from a different material than others or isolated from other parts are candidates for elimination. The program gives designers an estimated assembly time and minimum part count, with the focus on saving money at the development level.
Dewhurst said the company is seeing increased interest in DFA’s complementary software, Design For Manufacture (DFM) software (known together as DFMA). Currently driving about 40 percent of sales, DFM helps identify the cost and cost-drivers of the parts used by manufacturers.
"DFM concurrent costing helps manufacturers understand cost and cost drivers at early phases of the design of the product," he said. "Very early on in the design process, I can pull together all the funds required to produce all of the parts in my product."
This allows for a certain degree of "should-costing" between companies and suppliers, Dewhurst said, by helping design engineers and purchasing engineers understand what production costs should be.
The company maintains that DFMA reduces design-to-product-launch cycles by as much as 50 percent; parts count 30 to 70 percent; and assembly time by 50 to 80 percent.
Boothroyd Dewhurst has worked with Harley-Davidson Motor Company to customize DFMA to the motorcycle manufacturer’s needs for the last two years. Last month, Illinois-based John Deere & Company purchased a corporate license for the software.
And the software, which comes in German, Japanese, Korean and Chinese language versions, has created international interest as well – the company has agents in Europe, Asia and Australia.
Gilligan said the DFMA product is an especially useful tool for supplier collaboration.
"Instead of just beating up on a supplier during negotiations, both sides now have knowledge about what the costs should be," he said.
The company also offers two other versions of the software, Design For Service (DFS) and Design For Environment (DFE). DFS helps assess service (in regard to time and cost) and warranty costs.
DFE assesses the environmental impact of products.
"(DFE) helps optimize the disassembly process," Dewhurst said. "If environmental impact is the thing you’re most concerned about, you can look at the optimum methods for disposing the product."
For example, "If you were going to take a computer apart, you’d want to take out the hard drive and anything toxic like a battery, but the rest might be scrap metal or plastic," said Gilligan.
Dewhurst said the company does not really have any meaningful head-to-head competitors.
"There have been a few software programs over the years that were similar," he said. "Our biggest competitors are consultants who will do it for you. The problem with that is they (clients) have no future capabilities."
In the academic tradition, each summer the company presents a conference – the International Forum on Design for Manufacture and Assembly – for which users of Boothroyd Dewhurst’s software are invited to present on the practical applications of the DFMA software at their companies. Presenters at last year’s event, held in Newport, included representatives from Raytheon Systems Company, Nokia Networks, Israel Aircraft Industries Ltd. and Compaq.
Gilligan said the company is somewhat isolated from others in the Rhode Island high tech sector, but for a reason.
"We could be anywhere – we’re here because we’re near the University of Rhode Island," he said. "We don’t really need to have face-to-face contact, except for training."
The company has had good luck with employee retention, according to Gilligan: "We have a 10-year anniversary lunch, and we’ve run out of people."
Half of the employees at Boothroyd Dewhurst are dedicated to research and development – "high for a software company… The hardest part of that is probably the engineering," said Gilligan.
Hardest because each calculation for every different process included in the software must be coded to allow for the use of a broad range of materials and parts. The code for drilling a hole, for example, is 21 lines long, "and that’s a very simple one," said Gilligan.
"Software development itself is a challenge," Dewhurst agreed. "We spend a lot of time and money really trying to make these world-class. It’s a lot of time and a lot of debugging software. As long as it takes to code, it can take that long debugging."
Another challenge has been to keep current with users’ needs in terms of software format in regards to operating system preference, from UNIX to DOS to Windows. Now, "from a technology standpoint, we’re adding new things but also having to keep up with what people are using in a Windows environment," said Gilligan.
