Videos
Problem
A company that manufactures circuit boards wants to redesign the layout of its plant. Before beginning construction, the company wants to evaluate the new layout to minimize potential operational issues.
Solution
A view of the project as if you were standing there. Students at the University of Pittsburgh analyzed the impact of changing the plant layout. They entered variables for both the current system and the proposed system, including:
- Orders and order information
- Distances between departments
- Processing time on the production line
- Testing information
- Pass rates
- Machine reliability
- Number of workers
- Storage time for circuit boards
The results were measured based on:
- Number of products waiting in queues or storage
- Travel distance for products
- Total time in the system for each order
- Worker utilization
Result
The simulation showed that with the proposed layout:
- The number of products stored in queues increased significantly.
- The number of products processed within the required time did not improve for four of the five products and improved only slightly for the fifth.
Although there were minor improvements in some areas, they were not sufficient to justify the cost of reconstruction or the operational issues introduced by the new layout.