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Articles

	Graphic Arts Monthly
	Five Basic Principles of Plant Layout
	By Hal Ettinger

Consider this: Your plant layout is either your silent partner or your worst enemy. If it's your silent partner working behind the scenes, your layout makes your plant operations efficient and earns you money. If it's your worst enemy, your layout erodes your bottom line and makes working at your plant an employees' nightmare. Silent partner, or worst enemy? Not a difficult decision when selecting one or the other.

In any plant layout the primary objective is twofold:

1. To move materials and people in the most direct and efficient manner and...
2. To allow for growth-i.e., new production equipment, new or expanding departments-without altering established material-handling aisles and practices (assuming they're working) or reducing square footage of work-in-process and staging areas.

Movement of product and potential for growth determine if your plant layout is a silent partner or your enemy. And they should be the two standards to guide you in evaluating your existing layout or when expanding or moving operations.

Certainly you don't want your plant layout to be your enemy. So the question becomes: What are the basic principles that will make your plant layout your silent partner? Try these on for size.

1. Establish department and area adjacencies. Placing office, pre-press and production areas close to each other increases communication (verbal, visual), reduces travel time for product and people and makes moving materials more efficient.
2. Consider location of building columns. This will ensure that building columns will not make operating areas around equipment too tight or limit placing new production equipment.
3. Establish dedicated aisles. These make moving people, raw materials, staging, work-in-process and finished goods faster and easier.
4. Use building height. Going up instead of out will reduce square footage in raw materials and finished goods.
5. Plan for expansion. This will maintain established department/area adjacencies, common staging areas (i.e., paper to press and W.I.P.) and material-handling practices. It will also keep aisles from being compromised or negatively impacted when new equipment is installed or market forces create new departments or grow existing ones.

If you follow these principles, what will your plant layout look like when you're finished? Well, it really depends on your expansion plans or, more often, on the expansion options you may be faced with. Among your options:

1. Will you be expanding your present building or converting another existing building into a printing facility?
2. Will you be building a new facility?
3. If not expanding or moving, will you be looking to extend the shelf life of your building (putting off an expansion or move for the time being) by re-laying out your existing operations to better utilize your plant floor space and improve operating efficiencies?

Whether attempting to extend the shelf life of your existing building, expand or relocate to newer quarters, it turns out that the least sexy part of the building-the shipping and receiving dock locations often "drive" the plant layout. Why? Because the receiving docks start the movement of product (i.e., raw materials), and shipping docks complete it. (i.e., finished goods).

As a result, you have three basic plant layout possibilities:

1. U-shape - where docks are on the same side of building;
2. straight-line - shipping & receiving docks are on opposite ends of the building;
3. "L" shaped - shipping & receiving docks are separated but not on opposite ends.

The example shown here is a U-shape plant layout with finished goods returned to the same dock area where raw materials are received.

Layout Diagram

Plant layout is the engine that powers the printing plant. You control the horsepower

Hal Ettinger holds a degree in architecture from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. A former pressman and production manager with a commercial print shop in Wisconsin, he is now president of RBE Company, Lawrence, Kansas a company providing project management, plant layout, and engineering design services exclusively to the printing industry.

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