What is Plant Design?
Plant design (also knows as shop floor design or factory design) is an industrial engineering methodology that helps in improving multiple manufacturing objectives, for example:
- Maximize production capacity
- Improve flexibility and responsiveness
- Minimize production lead time
- Reduce WIP and supply chain inventory
- Improve safety and ergonomics
- etc.
With Industry 4.0, plant design also includes subtler aspects like planning, development and implementation of the right MES and IIoT systems to achieve the above objectives better and faster, collectively termed as "smart manufacturing".
Benefits of Plant Design
Long-term success of any manufacturing operations depends heavily on the way a plant is designed. Physical aspects like position and alignment of production lines, meeting areas, display of score boards, andons, WIP inventory space, etc impacts the flow, flexibility of production and safety of a plant.
Subtler aspects of the plant design like implementation of a manufacturing execution system, becomes critical to scale your manufacturing operations. Aspects like responsiveness, quality and low inventory production can be truly enhanced with the right digitization solution, custom made for your unique industry, and your unique situation.
Factonity's Plant design consulting services can be beneficial, if you have any of the following questions:
- How to optimize plant layout?
- How to reduce production lead time?
- How to maximize (de-bottleneck) the production capacity of your plant?
- How to implement an MES system that gives more visibility into your day-to day production?
- How can a better plant design free-up shop-floor WIP inventory?
- How to reduce scrap/waste and defects in your production process?
- What systems can enable early detection of defects in operations, and save costly rejection or re-works of large batches?
- How to make a manufacturing setup flexible enough to handle maximum variety of products?
- How to improve asset utilization?
- How to improve OEE(overall equipment effectiveness) of critical equipment?
- How to improve schedule adherence, without piling up huge inventory?
- How to enable JIT (just in time) manufacturing for our customers or our demand driven supply chain?
- Or anything in similar lines..