Facilities In Lean Manufacturing Strategy 

Lean Manufacturing is all about adding value and avoiding waste. Facility planning (land, buildings, equipment, furnishings) provides the physical capability to add value.

Facilities are expensive. Their lifetime is in decades. They take years to commission. By their nature, they are one of the most important strategic elements of a business enterprise. This is why facility design and the strategic thinking that should precede it are so important.

Many symptoms of inappropriate business architecture appear as layout or material handling issues.

A properly designed plant layout is an important source of competitive advantage. It can:

• Operate At Low Cost

• Provide Fast Delivery

• Accommodate Frequent New Products

• Produce Many Varied Products

• Produce High or Low Volume Products

• Produce At The Highest Quality Level

• Provide Unique Services Or Features

These are examples of what Wickham Skinner called "Key Manufacturing Tasks."

The Lean Facility

Layout is an integral part of a Lean Manufacturing Strategy. Meaningful re-structuring requires corresponding physical changes in the layout.

Conversely, a layout re-design can be the catalyst for re-structuring. A layout project, properly done, can demonstrate the need for change to an organization reluctant to tear itself apart and rebuild.

• Product-Focused workcells

• Focused Plant-Within-Plant Factories

• Reduced Storage & Handling Space

• Kanban Stockpoints

• Direct Delivery of Raw Materials

• Integrated Support Areas 

Facility Planning Series

The links below take you to a series of pages that summarize the basics of Facility Planning and Plant Layout.

Four fundamental facility elements go into every layout or spaceplan--

• Space Planning Units (aka Activity Areas or SPUs)

• Affinities

• Space

• Constraints.

Levels of Detail help organize facility planning into manageable sub-projects. Each sub-project has a series of tasks that the design team must complete. The tasks and their sequence differ for each level.

These levels are:

• I Global (Site Location)

• II Supra (Site Planning)

• III Macro (Building Layout)

• IV Micro (Workcell/Department Layout)

• V Sub-Micro (Workstation Design)

Other pages illustrate the tasks and their sequence for each of the most common levels with a Project Plan (or process map). While several of these pages are still under construction, the information can be found in the references below.