BUSI 3010 Week 9 Shop Floor Layout Proposal Example

Cutting Material Travel From 280 to 104 Meters per Job: A Layout Proposal That Puts a Stone Shop's Saw, CNC and Polishing Stations in One U-Shaped Line, Priced Against a Cheaper Partial Move

Student Name

Walden University

BUSI 3010: Operations Management

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Cutting Material Travel From 280 to 104 Meters per Job: A Layout Proposal That Puts a Stone Shop's Saw, CNC and Polishing Stations in One U-Shaped Line, Priced Against a Cheaper Partial Move

The Current Arrangement

The Fargo countertop shop studied in this course (a composite) grew into its building one machine at a time. The slab yard sits outside the north door. The bridge saw stands along the east wall, near the yard. The CNC edging machine, bought later, went along the west wall because that was where the water recycling tank fit. The two polishing stations were placed back near the saw, where the original hand-finishing benches had been. Quality inspection happens in the middle of the floor, and finished pieces are staged at the south loading dock.

To measure travel, I followed twelve jobs from slab to staging in August 2028 and recorded every movement with a measuring wheel, counting each lift with the vacuum lifter as a handling move. Pieces from one job travel together on A-frame carts, but a typical kitchen needs two cart trips per segment because the pieces will not fit on one cart.

Table 1

Material Travel per Job, Current Layout

Averages of twelve jobs; Red River Stone & Surface and its building are composite.

The two longest segments are the trip across the shop from the saw to the CNC and the trip back from the CNC to polishing. Together they account for 144 of the 280 meters. Those two segments also require six of the eleven lifts, because pieces must come off the saw table onto a cart, off the cart onto the CNC, and back again.

The Proposed Arrangement

The proposal reorganizes the four processing stations into a U-shaped line along the north and west walls. The bridge saw stays where it is, nearest the yard. The CNC moves to the north wall beside the saw, under the same gantry crane, so pieces can be lifted directly from the saw table to the CNC table. The polishing stations move to the west wall immediately after the CNC, and inspection sits at the end of the U, closest to the dock.

Table 2

Material Travel per Job, Proposed Layout

Distances measured on a scaled floor plan; the yard door moves six meters east as part of the change.

Travel per job falls from 280 meters to 104, a reduction of 63 percent, and handling moves fall from eleven to seven. Muther (1973) built systematic layout planning on the idea that activities with heavy flow between them should sit next to each other, and the saw-to-CNC and CNC-to-polishing pairs carry the heaviest flow in this shop.

What the Gain Is Worth

At the walking pace recorded with loaded carts, about 0.6 meters per second, the 176 meters saved per job equal about five minutes. Each lift with the vacuum lifter takes about three minutes, so four fewer lifts save about twelve minutes. Together that is roughly seventeen minutes of handling labor per job, or about 4.5 hours a week at the current 16 jobs.

Handling time is only part of the value. Fewer lifts mean fewer chances to crack a piece; the shop recorded eight pieces cracked in handling in the first half of 2028, each remade at about $1,450. And because the CNC is the shop's constraint, the crane waits that cost it about an hour a week would mostly disappear when pieces come straight from the saw under the same crane.

What the Move Costs

Moving the CNC is expensive. It needs a new concrete pad, a new water line to the recycling tank and three days of downtime, which at the constraint means about nine lost jobs that must be made up with overtime. The contractor's estimate is $38,000 for the pad, plumbing and electrical work, plus about $6,000 in overtime to recover the lost output.

Against that, the yearly gain is roughly $7,200 in handling labor at $32 an hour, perhaps $11,600 in avoided remakes if handling cracks fall by half, and about 50 hours of recovered CNC time. On those direct savings, payback on $44,000 is a little over two years: reasonable, but not urgent for a shop that expects to replace its CNC within three years.

A Cheaper Partial Move

Moving only the polishing stations to the west wall, next to the CNC where it stands now, costs about $3,500 for new benches, water and air lines. That shortens the trip back from the CNC to a few meters and saves one lift, cutting travel per job from 280 to about 212 meters and lifts from eleven to ten. It captures about 39 percent of the distance gain, 68 of 176 meters, for less than a tenth of the cost.

Recommendation

Move the polishing stations now. Plan the full U-shaped line for the day the CNC is replaced, expected within three years, when the new machine will need a pad and plumbing anyway and the move costs little extra. Meller and Gau (1996) described how layout decisions increasingly have to account for future change rather than a single fixed design; tying the full move to the CNC's replacement treats this layout as a sequence rather than a one-time choice. Stevenson (2021) notes that process layouts often suffer from long, irregular material flows as volume grows, which is the condition this shop has reached.

References

Meller, R. D., & Gau, K.-Y. (1996). The facility layout problem: Recent and emerging trends and perspectives. Journal of Manufacturing Systems, 15(5), 351-366. https://doi.org/10.1016/0278-6125(96)84198-7

Muther, R. (1973). Systematic layout planning (2nd ed.). Cahners Books.

Stevenson, W. J. (2021). Operations management (14th ed.). McGraw Hill.