Manufacturing Plant Layout Improvement: Case study of a High-Temperature Heat Treatment Tooling Manufacturer in Northeast Indiana

As the number of competitors in the global marketplace is increasing very fast, it is essential for companies to reduce their lead-time to be sustainable game players. The objectives of this research are to a) improve the layout of a job shop production plant and b) enhance the flow of material from one station to another station to reduce lead times and enhance energy management. This paper focuses on a high-temperature heat treatment tooling manufacturer located in Northeast Indiana, USA. It found that the facility layout at the company was not optimal and over the past several decades, machines and equipment have been purchased and placed wherever there was room to place them. There was a significant amount of materials that are being back-tracked and moved by personnel, ultimately taking longer to produce the parts. The overall aspect of this research was to come up with an efficient robust system to improve the material flow throughout the manufacturing process and to ultimately reduce lead times to improve customers’ satisfaction and enhance energy management. For this purpose, the collective system design methodology integrated with systematic layout planning technique is applied to recognize systems’ needs and find possible scenarios based on activity relationships analysis, adjacency of operations, and total closeness ratings. Through the relationship activity diagram, the importance of adjacency among operations was assessed. Analysis on minimizing the travel distance and material handling along with conducted energy assessments verified that there are significant reductions in feet travelled per day and substantial increases in energy savings. Implementing such a layout improvement project resulted in a 16.66 % up to 33% reduction in lead-time of products (heat treating baskets), significant decreases in weekly overtime hours, and considerable enhancements in energy usage.