Unit 4: Facility Design Journal
This time I going to write about Facility Design. Facility design, According to what I has been learned in the reading, makes much difference; since it have an impact on both “quality and productivity”. Furthermore, facility design helps you find the best performance of the employees of any company; because it seeks to find that the employees do their job more efficiently. Moreover, facility design, after planning and taking in consideration different types of layouts, it is important to establish how much inventory can be stored and/or produce.
Facility design covers many important concepts, but today I've chosen write about the following three: Capacity, Economy of Scale and Layout. I must first define capacity as the maximum that can be produced. It is very important for an Operations Manager to know when and how much the company should improve its design on capacity, since the lack of planning in facility design may affect different areas, such as: lead time, customer responsiveness, operating costs, and a firm's ability to compete, and the company could lose customers.
On the other hand, the percent of capacity utilization that minimizes average unit cost or the best operating level is certainly related to Economies of Scale. This is could achieve when fixed costs can be spread on a high number of units produced, when the operational costs do not increase linearly with levels of output, etc.
Finally, Layout... This is nothing more and nothing less that structures, physical or procedures for a better development of the business. The layouts help to establish effectively the purpose of any company. Furthermore, an effective layout helps everyone the business… “Employees & customers”.