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Articles
Graphic Communications
A Blueprint for Success: Plant Design Drives Process Efficiency
By George A. Milite
Your physical plant is more than just the place where your company conducts its operations, it’s an integral part of the operations workflow itself. How well your plant layout and physical condition meet your company’s production and business needs can save you time and money or squander both.
A plant layout that requires materials to be hauled from one side of the building to the other in order to move them to the next process step is not only inefficient, but a roadmap for under-utilizing employee time, slowing down the customer delivery process, possibly damaging acceptable goods, and even increasing the probability for on-the-job accidents. If you want to make changes, whether a simple remodeling, a more aggressive expansion, or an entire new facility, you first must have a solid idea of what you need, now and are likely to need in the future.
“You don’t want to move into a new plant or redesign a current plant and build all the same inefficiencies in,” notes Hal Ettinger, president of RBE Company in Lawrence, KS., which specializes in printing plant layout and design. “That’s why it’s important to have a detailed, careful plan before you begin.”
Plan, Plan, Plan
If you try to design or redesign a plant without a carefully constructed plan, you do so at your company’s peril. “You have to consider everything when you’re planning out a new facility,” says Ettinger.
The most obvious reason, of course, is cost. “Remember that each element of the plan can have an impact on all the other elements,” he explains. “The costs involved in one phase of the plan invariably affect other costs.” Moreover, he adds, it’s important to weigh the short-term gains of cutting certain costs over the longer-term need to incur those costs later. “Typically all expansions or plant upgrades cost more than the owner realizes or has budgeted. Therefore you have to prioritize. Less critical elements could be phased in later. You have to decide early on what’s most important. Phasing a project may not be optimal but might be the only practical way to proceed. If during the actual construction you decide that you have to make changes, that invariably adds to the overall cost.”
If you own the property, you want to build or redesign to suit your needs, but you should consider what might happen if those needs change demonstrably. “One consideration when you’re building a new plant should be whether it will be salable,” notes John Baeseman, senior engineer at Madison, WI-based Bodi Engineering, which specializes in manufacturing plant design. “That can be a key factor in the event you choose to relocate in the future.”
At AGI Klearfold’s plant in Chicago, planning was the key to a successful redesign of the company’s 300,000 square foot plant. “We wet through many CAD exercises to make sure we were using our space effectively,” notes Scott Headley, plant manager during the redesign (he’s now at AGI’s plant in Warrington, PA). “Since we lease the building, we had to make sure we were in sync with the owner’s requirements, and we also had to make sure we were in compliance with building requirements, including getting all the necessary permits to move walls and do other work.”
What’s Going In?
“In the printing business, 80 percent of what you do involves moving paper,” notes Tim Kilfoy, president of Fidlar Printing Co. in Davenport, IA. “The goal in improving plant efficiency is to reduce movement—to make the start-to-finish process as streamlined and efficient as possible.”
Fidlar needed to reconfigure its 65,000 square foot plant to accommodate the acquisition of a digital printing production group. “What we needed to do was figure out how to incorporate both functions under one roof and keep workflow moving, both during and after the redesign,” explains Kilfoy. “What we decided on after doing a needs analysis and getting feedback from our people was to create a sort of plant within a plant. Our traditional sheet-fed offset business can work side by side with our digital business, each working within a separate ‘horseshoe’ design.” By having both functions working close to each other, it allows them to share certain equipment, and it also makes it easier to cross-train employees. But it also keeps them separate enough that supplies and inventory don’t get mixed up.
Hutchison-Allgood Printing in Winston-Salem NC designed its current 40,000 square foot plant to accommodate growth well into the future. The property is big enough to handle an expansion and the back wall of the building can be broken out to allow for future expansion. “We found it helpful to have a scaled floor plan so we could figure out where each piece of equipment should go,” notes chairman Allie Hutchison, Sr.. “We didn’t want to find ourselves playing checkers with pieces of heavy equipment.”
Workflow was also a consideration in the plant layout. “To us, workflow goes from the time someone brings the order in to the time it gets shipped out. We wanted our operations to reflect that.” The plant includes two identical Heidelberg six-color presses. Why two identical presses? “It gives us more flexibility,” says Hutchison. “If we have a particularly large press run, we can accommodate it, or we can run large jobs faster—and with two identical presses we add an element of continuity,” he explains. “Plus, in the event we’re having trouble with one press, we can rely on the other without having to reconfigure a job.”
One consideration that often gets overlooked is inventory. “It’s essential to good workflow to have a good system in place to keep track of your inventory and to make sure the inventory you need is in close enough proximity,” says Peter Basiliere, author of the NAPL guide Successful Print Buying: A Guide to Cost-Effective Procurement of Quality Printing. “You need to know exactly where you keep your raw materials like blank paper, pre-printed forms, and ancillary materials, and they have to be positioned so that it’s easy to follow the steps involved in getting a job done.” The goal, he adds, is to create a mistake-proof environment. “Of course, things will always happen—machines get jammed, for example. But you can make the process virtually mistake-proof if you streamline your workflow and stick to your plan.”
A common problem Baeseman has found with some companies that have expanded is that the space they started in is inappropriate for the kind of work they do. “A company located in an office building will usually be spread out on several floors. But for manufacturing needs, it’s really better to be on one floor. Another challenge is when a plant is near a railroad track or in an urban location. If you’re near buildings or utilities that can’t be moved, it limits your ability to expand your existing space.”
The Virtues of “Spring Cleaning”
Unneeded supplies, old equipment, excess inventory—all can pile up over a period of years and take up valuable space. Clearing that space can make an immediate difference. “When we decided to redesign, one of the first things we did was get a couple of dumpsters and throw out things we didn’t need,” says Fidlar’s Kilfoy. “We’d been in that building for nine years, and we were amazed at how much unnecessary materials we had accumulated.” In addition to throwing things out, selling unneeded equipment, and warehousing rarely needed supplies, Fidlar decided to make some of its smaller equipment more portable. “Smaller machines like drills and round corner machines didn’t need to occupy fixed space,” Kilfoy notes. “We put them on casters, which now allows us to move them off the floor when we don’t need them, and to position them appropriately when we do need them.”
Storing inventory properly doesn’t just save space—it saves the inventory itself. “When things aren’t in the right place, you can lose plenty to damage, and you can misplace large quantities of material, especially in a large space,” notes AGI’s Headley.
The Human Factor
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that people like to feel comfortable even in a factory environment. That means a space that’s organized, clean, well-lit, and temperature- controlled.
“A clean, well-lit plant rejuvenates the employees and makes them more productive,” says Basiliere. “Not only that, it tells customers who visit that plant ‘We’re proud of what we do here.’” Adds Headley, “We wanted to make the plant a nicer place to work, and that goal was reflected in the new locker rooms and cafeteria we added.”
Sometimes even a seemingly minor change can yield big results. “When we started remodeling, we decided to paint the shop floor,” says Fidlar’s Kilfoy. “We had no idea how much of a difference it would make, but it lightened up the plant and made the place look cleaner and more airy.”
Safety is a crucial element as well. Spaces should be well-ventilated and precautions against caustic chemicals are important. At Hutchison-Allgood, there’s a small room off the back of the building built of concrete blocks. “That’s where we store some of our flammable materials,” explains Hutchison. “The room is designed to ventilate any chemical fumes away from the main plant floor should the need arise, and the concrete floor is 14 inches lower than the plant floor to ensure that spills stay concentrated in that one location.”
People don’t just need a clean and safe environment—they also need to know what’s going on. Cross-training is a valuable means of increasing efficiency. “You don’t need to have everyone able to perform every job,” notes Basiliere. “But by giving them enough training to understand what their co-workers do, you’re giving them enough knowledge to understand the entire process, not just their job.” Everyone can look at the entire process with enough knowledge to make the work flow better.
Consider the Green
Environmental concerns are important, but today it’s more than adding pollution controls. Rising fuel costs make it necessary for companies with large spaces to find cost-effective ways to keep heating and cooling systems functioning as efficiently as possible.
Depending on where your plant is located, costs associated with heating and cooling can be controlled only so much. Allie Hutchison, Sr. recalls that in the days before efficient air conditioning, his plant in North Carolina had to close down by noon in the summer. “There was so much humidity that it was impossible to handle the paper,” he says. “We had no choice to run shifts after dark.”
To save lighting costs, companies can open up space by breaking down walls or adding windows. When retrofitting an older space that doesn’t offer as much flexibility, specialized lighting can be cost-effective. “We installed motion detectors for some of our lighting,” notes Headley. “That way, we’re not using unnecessary energy.”
When building a new plant, assuming you have the option, is it a good idea to build in a more temperate climate? Yes and no, says Ettinger. “It depends on where your clients, vendors and qualified workers are located. The savings you incur building in a better climate might be more than offset by your transport costs and training, so it’s critical to map out those costs as much as possible before making that decision .”
George A. Milite is a Philadelphia-based business management writer.
