When Simulation Shows You “Don’t Make Changes!”

A company that makes circuit boards wants to change the layout of the plant, but wants to minimize issues in the layout before they start building.

A view of the project, as if you were standing there.Students at the University of Pittsburgh looked at the value of changing the layout. The students entered variables for the current system and the proposed system:

• Orders and order information
• Distances between departments
• Processing time on production line
• Testing information
• Pass rates
• Machine reliability
• Number of workers
• Time that boards were in storage

The results were measured by:

• The number of products waiting for further processing in a queue or storage
• The travel distance for the products
• Time in the system for an order
• Workers as a resource.

The simulation indicated that with the proposed changes:

• The number of products sitting in storage increased significantly.
• The amount of products processed within the specified time did not increase for four of the five products, and just barely for the fifth.

While there were improvements in some areas, there weren’t enough improvements to offset the cost of reconstruction and compensate for the other issues created by the new layout.