Track: Facilities Planning and Management

Abstract

The facility layout problem is directly linked with the efficiency of the facility or the manufacturing line, which will give a direct impact to the production performance. The main objective of this project is to design a new optimized plant layout based on current plant layout through methodology experiment and evaluating the proposed alternative layouts using Systematic Layout Planning (SLP) Procedure and Line Balancing. This project is conducted in one of military vehicle manufacturing company in Pekan, Pahang. Currently, the company is having a major delay in production performance and high number of deficiency. Hence, the company needs an optimized plant layout to maximize the product capacity and manufacturing throughput time on a minimum utilization of resources environment. Based on the data analyzed, performance of current layout is very poor. It can be classified in two subjects, which are material flow and assembly sequence. The failure on managing these two subjects has given bad impact to the quality of the vehicle. Total defects found are 188 which the defects included method defect 77.1%, part defect 20.2% and design defect 2.7%. The alternative layout 1 has been proposed to solve this issue which covered 5 criteria; space utilize, flow of material, traffic flow, preferred closeness and safety and working condition. Nevertheless, this research managed to provide better understanding and valuable information on the effectiveness of plant layout can give impact on performance of the production. Recommendations are made to improve the plant layout in order to provide a better performance in production activity and product quality.