Plant layouts are critical to operational efficiency. An improved plant layout might decrease the factory footprint, allow more activities to be brought in-house, reduce waste (in both the Lean sense and the cost sense), and can enable improved operational design that allows the introduction of Single Piece Flow.

Single Piece Flow will dramatically reduce work in progress (inventory) and lead times. We have in the past half emptied a shopfloor while simultaneously reducing lead times and inventory leading to customer response times being cut by two thirds. This can give you a competitive advantage par excellence.

So, whether for a new plant or for an existing factory, we can work with you to develop new layout options that can reduce footprint, reduce non-value adding activities and transportation, and help to de-bottleneck a process.

We can also look at other aspects relating to Plant Layout, such as:

• Maintainability - ensuring access to plant and equipment is safely possible while plant is live and operating to facilitate condition monitoring and perhaps even certain intrusive tasks. Only being able to access plant while it is stopped and isolate greatly handicaps good maintenance - many if not most clues as to developing faults will disappear as soon as a process stops, and so breakdowns become unexpected and disruptive as opposed to detected prior to failure, managed and reduced.
• Production Resilience - designing plant and developing strategies to accommodate and maintain production at either full or a reduced rate in the event of critical plant outages and breakdowns

This topic of Plant Layout links very closely with Operational Design as one will strongly influence if not dictate the other, so any work we undertake is likely to have to consider both aspects in order to deliver the best benefit to you.