Plant layout improvement of the stainless-steel cookware manufacturing using ALDEP

Abstract

Improving plant layout design is a strategy that can increase production efficiency by situating several departments inside the plant in close proximity in accordance with the production process or the relationship between activities. This research aims to improve the plant layout of a small factory in Chiang Mai province that manufactures stainless steel home appliances as a case study using plant layout design utilizing the ALDEP (automated layout design program) principle. The six alternative plant layouts were created according to the expansion width and planning sequence. The sweep width was established as 1, 2 and 3 units, following 2 department sequence patterns. The plant layout with the greatest adjacency-based scoring was chosen to represent the plant layout based on the ALDEP principle, and subsequently compared with the original, the graph-based, and the CORELAP plant layout principles. The total score of relationship and distance material transport was used to evaluate. The study's results indicated that the plant layout based on the ALDEP principle was the most effective, followed by the CORELAP plant layout, the graph method, and the original plant layout methods, respectively. The material handling distance can be minimized to 48.50 meters, resulting in better outcomes than 50.30% of the original plant layout, 26.50% of the graph method plant layout, and 19.20% of the CORELAP method, even though the adjacency based scorings of all three methods were the same.