Week 9

This week we focused on Process Layout.  Our class textbook explains that layout planning "involves decisions about the physical arrangement of economic activity centers needed by a facility's various processes.  An economic activity center can be anything that consumes space...Layout has many practical and strategic implications.  Altering a layout can affect an organziation and how well it meets its competitive priorities."

Some of the ways that layout can affect an organizations and how well it meets its competitive priorities are:

• Increasing customer satisfaction and sales at a retail store
• Facilitating the flow of materials and information
• Increasing the efficient utilization of labor and equipment
• Reducing hazards to workers
• Improving employee morale
• Improving communication

Layouts are usually described as either flexible-flow, line-flow, fixed-position, or a hybrid.

One of the topics of the chapter I found interesting was the weighted-distance method, sometimes called hte load-distance method.  It's a mathematical tool that helps evaluate facility locations.  The objective is to select a layout that minimizes the total weighted distances.  I plan on trying this tool in the future.

The steps to arriving at a layout's weighted distance score are as follows:

• Calculate the distance (euclidean or rectilinear) measures between the economic centers.
• Determine the relative importance of each pair of centers being located close together.  The measure used to determine this can be a qualitative judgment on a scale from 0 to 10 or it could be the number of trips between each pair of centers per day, etc.  The number you come up with for each pair is their closeness factor or proximity score.
• Multiply the proximity scores by the distance between the centers.
• The sum of the products becomes the layout's weighted-distance score.

The problems we have done in class have been simple enough to do by hand.  There is an application that comes with the book that can help solve the problem too.  To this day, I haven't been able to get the application/add-in to work with my newer 2010 version of MS EXCEL.  I'm excited to say that I finally found an upgrade online and the system is working for me now.  I think it might be quicker to do it by hand for simple problems though.