Layout and flow improvements - Reduced walking time? Cost savings?

[2.5bostons]

Happy to hear you are doing an after diagram, that really helps to compare apples to apples, or rather meatballs to meatballs in this case...



Have you reduced touch time to product?

Are your financials contribution or activity based costing?

Did the changes help meet customer pull better?

[asutherland]

What you are refering to is call "apparent efficiency" which is not "true efficiency".

Classic example. A supervisor goes to his manager and says " We are doing super. We just built 125 pieces with 10 people, thats 25 pieces more than we normally do". The manager say's, why is that great? We are supposed to build only 100 pieces. You built 25 pieces too many. If you are able to build 125 pieces with 10 associates, then you should build 100 pieces with 8 people.
(125/10 = 12.5 pcs per person. 12.5 X 8 people =100).

In this first case, over producing what you cant sell is very expensive and wasteful. You just building, handling, ordering and storing material that's not going out the door.

When you say 2580' of walk time in a day has been saved, did you reduce your manpower? If the answer is 'NO" then your savings is "apparent" not "true".

If it eliminated overtime, then the savings is "true".
If you eliminated the need for a fork-truck, then the savings is "true" (lease of the cost of the truck is the savings)

Please don't try to grab money that isn't really there.

[rwdmike]

You might try to break down the work of each process into elemental times and use a moving line chart to visualize the process steps, from that you can determine the time saved by reducing walk, and or changing the layout. I am assuming that the processes were rebalanced afterwards as well.
Some companies also use MOST for standard walk time measurements.

[asutherland]

If you compare your output before your new layout, and measure it against you output after you new lay-out, if the gain is positive, the calculation is apparent. If you gain is negative . . . . go back to the old layout, or find out why the new layout did not gain a higher output. (resistance to change, horse play, etc)