The fundamental integration phase in the design of productive systems is the layout of
production facilities. A working definition of layout may be given as the arrangement of
machinery and flow of materials from one facility to another, which minimizes materialhandling
costs while considering any physical restrictions on such arrangement.
Usually this layout design is either on considerations of machine-time cost and product
availability; thereby making the production system product-focused; or on considerations
of quality and flexibility; thereby making the production system process-focused.
It is natural that while product-focused systems are better off with a ‘line layout’ dictated
by available technologies and prevailing job designs, process-focused systems, which are
more concerned with job organization, opt for a ‘functional layout’. Of course, in reality
the actual facility layout often lies somewhere in between a pure line layout and a pure
functional layout format; governed by the specific demands of a particular production
plant. Since our present paper concerns only functional layout design for process-focused
systems, this is the only layout design we will discuss here.
The main goal to keep in mind is to minimize material handling costs - therefore the
departments that incur the most interdepartmental movement should be located closest to
one another. The main type of design layouts is Block diagramming, which refers to the
movement of materials in existing or proposed facility. This information is usually
3
provided with a from/to chart or load summary chart, which gives the average number of
units loads moved between departments. A load-unit can be a single unit, a pallet of
material, a bin of material, or a crate of material. The next step is to design the layout by
calculating the composite movements between departments and rank them from most
movement to least movement. Composite movement refers to the back-and-forth
movement between each pair of departments. Finally, trial layouts are place on a grid that
graphically represents the relative distances between departments. This grid then
becomes the objective of optimization when determining the optimal plant layout.
We give a visual representation of the basic operational considerations in a processfocused
system schematically as follows: