Draw the trips of people or materials in the current and proposed layout and see, in distance, hours and money, how much the change saves.
Pre-sizing and estimating tool: results do not replace design, calculations or reports signed by a licensed professional, nor verification against the applicable codes and standards.
Floor plan to scale, same scale for both layouts. Line thickness is proportional to trips per day; grid every .
Moves from the longest current daily distance down, compared with the proposed layout.
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It is a drawing of the path a person or material takes through the plant, traced on the floor plan. When lines cross and double back they look like a plate of spaghetti and reveal motion waste. The calculator turns the drawing into distance, hours and money to compare the current layout with the proposed one.
Use a scaled floor plan or measure with a tape from one corner of the building: x across the width and y along the length, with the origin at the lower-left corner. Mark the spot where the person stops, such as the front of the machine or bench. Accuracy of a foot or two is enough.
Per cycle when the trip repeats with every part or batch: count how often each trip happens in one cycle (0.2 means once every 5 parts) and enter cycles per day. Per day when trips are irregular, such as fetching tools or taking scrap away: count trips on a typical day.
In the machining example with 8 locations, the operator walks about 595 ft per part in the current layout and 126 ft in the proposed cell. At 80 parts a day, walking drops from about 4 h to under 1 h a day, roughly 790 h a year, or about US$ 30k at US$ 38 an hour.
Rectilinear adds the x and y moves, like walking along aisles; it is the most realistic in most plants. Euclidean is the straight line and suits open areas; it gives smaller values. Use the same one for both layouts so the comparison is fair.
Unloaded, people walk about 4 to 4.5 ft/s; pushing a cart or carrying a light load, around 3.3 ft/s, the example value. Best of all, time a known route a few times in your own plant.
No. It shows the value of time no longer spent walking. It becomes money when the freed time is used to produce more, cut overtime or reassign a person. Take the result to the kaizen calculator to compare it with the cost of moving machines, and check aisles, maintenance access and exit routes in the new layout.
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