Content area
Full Text
The complete design of a facility requires work from many disciplines within an organization: sales and marketing, purchasing, human resources, accounting, and more. More visible is the w,ork of architects, structural engineers, process engineers, and management. Architects and structural engineers check soil conditions, building codes, and infrastructure, detailing the structure, appearance, and internals of the building and site. Process engineers may plan the production procedures. To guide and coordinate all of these efforts, management sets strategic policies.
Industrial engineers also play key roles. They often manage the overall project and report to top management, and they may perform some or all of the above tasks. Most importantly, they plan the use of space. These space plans, at various detail levels, become the centerpiece for coordinating the entire project.
Layout, or space planning, is the central focus of facilities design and dominates the thoughts of most managers. But factory or office layout is only one detail level. Ideally, a facility design proceeds from the general to the particularfrom global site location to workstation. Larger strategic issues are decided first.
It is useful to think of space planning in five levels, as illustrated in Figure 1. These levels range from the global maps of site location to engineering drawings of tools and workstations.
Level 1: Global site location
During global location, the site location level, the firm decides where to locate facilities and determines their missions. A facility mission statement is a concise summary of products, processes, and key manufacturing tasks. A facility rarely can perform more than two or three key manufacturing tasks well. The mission statement is therefore an important guide for facilities planners and others as they consider various design tradeoffs
Other outputs at this level usually include a report to management For multiple sites maps showing site locations and customer activity are common, as illustrated in Figure 2.
The cost of planning at Level 1 is small. Global location usually involves a few top exeutives and one or two industrial engineers or consultants. Each level below requires more and more people, analysis, and detailed engineering. Yet, the corporate budget process frequently demands that all significant planning be delayed until after a decision is made to proceed with site acquisition. Those levels with...