OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT (Facility Design) Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT (Facility Design) - Essay Example Another consideration to keep in mind in facility design is the management of equipment replacement or its maintenance to comply with business continuity plans (Meyers & Stephens, 2004). There are instances where facility design also includes working with the landscape of the infrastructure to maximize the space. This is mostly true in facilities where the cost of real estate or usable space is expensive however, business operations and logistics consideration mandate that they work within the infrastructure. From a management perspective facility designs should provide operational efficiencies that would assure more production output. The facility design of a printing and enveloping facility of a billing service company will be examined. The primary focus of the analysis is to ensure that wastage in terms of time and product routing are not only exposed but quantified. However, health and safety factors including business continuity considerations will also be taken into considerati ons to ensure that the optimum design is being followed or not. The flexibility of the components of the facility will also be examined to determine their efficacy when it comes to their function. Attached is the rough drawing of the facility design using blocks to represent the major equipment in the facility. Given the nature of their business, the company name and location will be kept confidential for security reasons. Printing and Enveloping Facility loading area for bills for delivery and loading area for raw materials Postal Area Segregation Section Paper Cooling and Staging area for enveloping Print Paper and Envelop storage area. Evaluation and Analysis After the processing of the image of the bill in the computer, the generated file will be printed using the high speed laser printers. After the bill has been printed the bill forms will be staged and cooled at room temperature to prevent warping at the inserting machine. Once cooled the inserting machines will cut and fold the bills and put them into envelops together with promotional inserts if there are any. The inserted bill will then be segregated by their area to determine the amount of their postage. The posting machines will then mark each bill for postage. The segregation process will also segregate the bills that are faster and cheaper to deliver through a delivery service. The rest of the bills will be sent through regular postal mail service. The bills generated through this process are the customers of the clients of the mailing service that opted for printed bills instead of email or electronic bills. The areas to consider in the analysis of the facility design are the materials used and how they are affected by each of the process. An example of this is how the papers are heated by the printing process which makes it very pliant. This makes it difficult to cut and fold the bills for it to be properly inserted in envelops. Since this is a real concern it makes sense for air conditioners t o cool the staging area after printing before they are inserted into the enveloping machines as indicated in the facility design. There are only two printers as against three inserting machines since the printer is much faster than the enveloping machines. The printers also generate a lot of heat that it makes sense to have more air coolers in