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Factory Layouts
As one of the world’s leading furniture technology centres, FIRA is focussed on improving the Quality, Cost and Delivery (QCD) of the worldwide furniture sector.
The most effective way to improve QCD in your current facility is changing the layout using proven industrial design and drill down to the best layout option for the manufactured products. Facilities and workplace design is one of the most important parts of a factories operation, bad workplace design that has grown historically with the business needs to be reviewed and modified.
The FIRA factory layout activity aims to deliver detailed scale drawings with substantiating technical report for the layout design required to manufacture the current furniture products within the boundaries of the site.
The new layout will improve quality, cost and delivery of the client’s furniture by maximising material and information flow using lean manufacturing concepts in the layout design.
FIRA has been involved in many projects to modify existing factory layouts as the following case studies show:
ISU Case Study Arden Windows Case Study
The project route for the client will consist of the following:
A Field Visit to Existing Factory to capture Information
- Meet with the client and agree project scope, deliverables and timescales
- Measure and redraw current factory layout and infrastructure
Information gathered while on field visit:
- Organisational Map
- Material and Communication flow diagrams
- Product – Volume analysis of the business
- Inventory and space analysis
- Current Machinery footprint and capacities
- Physical infrastructure
- Constraints (e.g. unmovable infrastructure)
New Layout Development and Report – these days can all be done on site if necessary
Following on from the field visit the FIRA engineer will undertake the following design process:
- Space planning in the new / existing facility – Define Space planning units
- Create affinity Diagram and develop best option space plan
- Identify constraints in the building that effect best option space plan
- Product – Volume analysis - current and future product volume by type or pick a standard product to follow through the process
- Inventory Space analysis
- Analyse current machinery capacity based on product volume analysis
- Individual work cell process and structure design
The project deliverables for this kind of activity would be:
• Produce a final report detailing all the findings with steps and reasons for particular site layout, workplace design / machine position decisions.
• Produce detailed scale AUTOCAD DWG’s of new site layout with detail of each process and workflow routings.
• Electronic copies of information contained on CD-ROMs to be distributed to the client
If you would like to learn more about FIRA's Factory Layout consultancy services then please contace Bruce Lovell on 01438 777700 or email blovell@fira.co.uk
