Track: Human Factors and Ergonomics

Abstract

Facility layout enhancements that focus on ensuring smooth flow of operation without taking into consideration the needs of workers are deemed useless whenever operational inefficiencies occur due to worker’s health and safety. Therefore, the integration of process analysis, ergonomics and plant layout simulation into a facility layout model ensure both improvement on efficiency and productivity of the operation and the workers. This paper proposes a model that takes into account process variables such as productive and unproductive time and distance travelled, ergonomic variables such as body posture and
awkward position, weight handled or muscular load, workstation dimension  and appropriateness to workers, physical and environmental hazards  and variables such as productivity (units produced per hour), in-process percentage (process efficiency), resource utilization and units produced for plant layout simulation to create a comprehensive analysis and measure the improvement and the performance of the integrated framework. To test the effectiveness of the integrated model, the proponent incorporated an actual industrial case to compare and evaluate existing and proposed layout results and also utilized simulation software to validate the procedure and support methodology applicability.

Keywords: facility layout design, ergonomics, simulation, model, process analysis