Designing Product Layout

• In flow shops, it generally consist of a fixed sequence of workstations

  Product Layout
• In product layout, workstation are generally separated by buffers (queues of WIP) ) to store work waiting for processing and are often linked by gravity conveyors.
• This occurs when a work center complete a unit but cannot release it because the in - process storage at the next stage is full

  Flow Blocking Delay
• This occurs whenever one stage complete works and no units from the previous stage are awaiting processing

  Lack of Work Delay
• It is a product layout dedicated to combining the components of a good or service that has been created previously

  assembly line
• It is a technique to group tasks among workstations so that each workstation has - in the ideal case- the same amount of work.

  Assembly line balancing
• What generally dictated the sequence of tasks required to assemble a product?

  Physical Design
• Assembly line balancing focuses on organizing work efficiently in flow shops.
• With a large number  of tasks, the number of possible workstation configurations can be very large, making the balancing problem very complex.

  Line Balancing Approach
•  In designing process layouts, we are concerned with the arrangement of departments or work centers relative to each other.
• In general, work centers with a large number of moves between them should be located close to one another.
• The first focus of designing process layout is on the costs associated with moving materials or the inconvenience that customers might experience in moving physical locations.