Plant & Cell Design
It’s often an eye-opening experience for people to see the amount of Transportation and Motion waste that is present in their organizations. When your layout is not ideal, it leads to a lot of wasted time moving people and products from place to place, as well as increased amounts of inventory as those areas get filled up in an effort to avoid having to move as often. In short – bad things happen.
By optimizing your plant/cell/area layout, you can:
- Reduced occupied floor space – making better use of the space you have,
- Avoid the expense of moving people and items from place to place,
- Increase capacity, efficiency & throughput
- Reduce inventory
One tool we use often when performing this analysis is a Spaghetti Diagram.
By mapping the physical flow of people &/or products, we can see where opportunities for improvement lie. Physical distances and cycle times are documented & analyzed in order to properly identify the Current State; then we engage with the team to outline what a Future State should look like. Can equipment be moved? Can certain operations be eliminated? By engaging with process experts, we ensure that all opportunities are identified and analyzed for risk, cost and potential impact. Then – and this is where we leave our competition behind – we roll up our sleeves and start implementing these ideas. We won’t simply present to you a logistics plan and wish you the best. We’ll actually grab a pallet jack and start helping!
Most of our consultants are degreed engineers, and all of us have actually worked in industry before becoming consultants. Most firms can’t say that. Instead of a former Plant & engineering Manager with 25 years’ manufacturing experience (Paul Critchley), they’ll send in someone with a degree in psychology or history to pitch you the same old textbook solutions that have been around for decades. Not us. We’ve been there, done that, and have the practical, hands-on knowledge to help you get to where you want to go better and faster than other firms can.
