Proplanner: Internet & Intranet Based Process Engineering

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Layout Planning in Flow Planner

Proplanner’s new Layout Planning capabilities within Flow Planner, provides industrial, manufacturing and layout engineers with a quick, objective layout design tool. Based on Richard Muther’s Systemic Layout Planning (SLP) techniques, Flow Planner diagrams, charts and scores alternative designs using relationships between activities as the key measure of layout efficiency. Relationships are assigned reason factors such as supervision, noise and dirt, energy requirements, shared equipment, personnel movement and material flow intensity. Since little up-front data gathering is required, multiple layouts can be developed, scored and analyzed in drastically less time than traditional methods.

Generate Relationship Charts

Flow Planner uses relationship data to automatically generate relationship charts. The relationship chart is an organizational tool for identifying relationships between areas in a plant. It can be used to quickly review relationships and their reasons among an entire set of plant activities. Each “diamond” records the relationship between two work centers. The top half of the diamond shows how closely two areas should located with a rating level (A, E, I, O, U and X).

Value	Closeness
A	Absolutely Necessary
E	Especially Important
I	Important
O	Ordinary – Closeness OK
U	Unimportant
X	Not Desirable

The reason for the rating level is coded in the lower half of each diamond and explained further in the “reason box” on the form.

Generate Relationship Diagrams

Relationship Diagrams relate the various plant activities to each other visually and geographically to form the basic pattern of a layout. Flow Planner does this by converting the relationship chart of “closeness-ratings” into a diagram.

Flow Planner guides the user through the diagramming process. Beginning with “A” locations and working down through the priority list (via the Diagram Filter feature), users can minimize the distance between activities that need to be next to each other. By rearranging the layout as each level of need is added, users address the most important needs first and arrive at the best possible arrangement.

Visually identify pros and cons of future state
layout designs once numerical relationships
have been assigned.

Features

Variable width and color-coded relationship lines generated automatically from either adjacency and/or flow data for up to 256 unique activities
Intelligent layout-based relationship lines can be queried or filtered
Sophisticated layout scoring and comparison capabilities
Based on Richard Muther’s Systemic Layout Planning techniques

Benefits

Quick and easy generation of colorful and informative layout-based relationship diagrams
Sophisticated layout analysis with little to no data collection
Powerful analysis routines effortlessly score and compare layout routines quantitatively

For more information see the Flow Planner...

Also see the Workplace Planner...