Effectiveness measurement of facilities layout

Measuring effectiveness in an existing facilities layout is a prerequisite in order to initiate any action that will improve layout effectiveness. Available methods on measurement of layout effectiveness help measure it in respect to only material handling cost and select an effective layout from a set of available alternatives. Nevertheless, factors such as empty travel of material handling equipment, layout flexibility and area utilisation contribute significantly towards the layout effectiveness. Thus, it is necessary to have a measurement model to determine the facilities layout's effectiveness by considering all significant factors. Hence, a measurement model considering a set of three layout effectiveness factors namely Facilities Layout Flexibility (FLF), Productive Area Utilisation (PAU) and Closeness Gap (CG) is developed in our research. The proposed model will enable the decision-maker of a manufacturing enterprise to analyse a layout in three different aspects; based on which they can make decision towards productivity improvement. Due to the space limitation, this paper only discusses about the measurement of the CG. The CG is developed in respect to the objective of bringing closer the highly interactive facilities/departments. The CG presented in this paper extends other related works by incorporating numerous aspects of layout that include: empty travel of material handling equipment, information flow, personnel flow and equipment flow.