Measures Of Effectiveness
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009One advantage of process layouts is their ability to satisfy a variety of processing requirements. Customers of materials in these systems requires different operations and different paths through the system. Materials oriented systems necessitate the use of variable path material handling equipment to move materials from work center to work center, and in customer oriented systems, people must ravel or be transformed from work center to work center. In both cases, transportation costs or time can be significant. Because of this factor, one of the major objectives in process layout is to minimize transportation costs, distance, or time.
This is actually accomplished by locating departments with relatively high interdepartmental work flow as close together as possible. other concerns in choosing among alternative layouts includes initial costs in setting up the layout, expected operating costs, the amount of effective capacity created, and the case of modiying the system if the need arose.