An integrated approach for facilities planning based on Apple`s procedure and ELECTRE method

Abstract

Facility planning is concerned with the design, layout, and accommodation of people, machines and activities of a system. Most of the researchers try to investigate the production area layout and the related facilities. However, few of them try to investigate the relationship between the production space and its relationship with service departments. The aim of this research to develop a conceptual framework (CFW) that integrate different approaches in order to evaluate, analyse and select the best facilities planning method that able to explain the relationship between the production area and other supporting departments and its effect on human efforts. To achieve the objective of this research three different approaches have been integrated: Apple's layout procedure as one of the effective tools in planning factories, ELECTRE method as one of the Multi Criteria Decision Making methods (MCDM) and modelling and simulation approach to minimize the risk o getting poor facilities planning. Dalia industries have been selected as a case study to implement our CFW. The factory have been divided two main different area: the whole facility (layout A), and the manufacturing area (layout B). After analyzing the data gathered the whole facility was divided into 11 departments, whereas the manufacturing area was divided into 10 activities. There are five factors that the alternatives were compared upon which are: Inter department satisfactory level, total distance travelled for workers, total distance travelled for the product, total time travelled for the workers, and total time travelled for the product. Three different layout alternatives have been developed for each area in addition to the original layouts. Apple's layout procedure was used to study and evaluate the different alternatives layouts, the study and evaluation of the layouts was done by calculating scores for each of the factors. After obtaining the scores from evaluating the layouts, ELECTRE method was used to compare the proposed alternatives with each other and with the existing layout. ELECTRE compares the alternatives based on their concordance and discordance indices. The alternatives were ranked from best to worst where regarding to the layouts concerned with the whole facility A.2 is the best alternative, and for the manufacturing area B.4 is the best alternative. Finally, Delmia quest software was used as a simulation program to run a simulation for the production line. A simulation was first done for the existing production line and show that the estimated production rate is 261 units/day. The results have been analysed based on utilization percentage and idle time. Two different scenarios have been proposed based on different objectives. The first scenario is by focusing on low utilization machines and their idle time, this was resulted in minimizing the number of machines used by three with the addition of the works who maintain them without having an effect on the production rate. The second scenario is to increase the production rate by upgrading the curing machine which led to the increase in the daily productivity by 7%. From 261 units to 281units.