Operation management 6000

1. Cooper Wine Racking and Cellar Company

Cooper Wine Racking and Cellar Company is a small but growing carpentry job shop that specializes in natural-finish redwood racking systems for storage and display of wine bottles. These racks and cabinets are created by processing redwood lumber through a series of work centers to reduce it to standard components, which are then assembled into seemingly customized goods in an assemble-to-order approach to production. Cooper Wine Racking has been so successful in building wine cellars and displays for wine collectors and retails stores, it plans to move to a larger building it has just leased. Cooper Wine Racking must organize a layout within the restrictions of that building, which has been divided into the 12 equal-sized zones shown in the Ground Plan of New Building layout.

The owner of the building is willing to install interior walls according to Cooper Wine Racking’s specifications, with some limitations. First, the order is not willing to change the locations of doors along the exterior of the building. This is important because, of the 12 functional areas within Cooper’s layout, only the front office or the demo cellar are appropriate locations for the front entrance, meaning that one of these two areas must be assigned to zone 4. Likewise, the shipping department and lumber storage must each be assigned an exterior loading bay door, confining their locations to zones 11 and 12. Second, the building owner wishes to minimize the expense of running water lines and sewer drains. Plumbing enters through the west wall of the building, so the owner is only willing to install restrooms within the first four zones of the building. Because Cooper will request restrooms in both its front office and production office areas, these two areas must be located somewhere within zones 1 through 4.

To aid the layout design process further, Cooper Wine Racking has determined a closeness rating for each possible pair of neighboring areas within its facility, as organized by the REL diagram shown below.

Questions

1. Using the suggested coding below for the closeness rating, recommend a good initial good layout for Cooper Wine Racking by assigning each of the 12 functional areas to 1 of the 12 zones in the ground plan, working within the building owner’s restrictions.

2. Calculate and report the score earned by your recommended layout, based on the scale provided below: [ Hint: Treat the point as the number of ‘pseudo trips’ between any pair of processing departments ]. Assume all inter-department ‘trips’ are along the aisles

· A =1000 points

· E = 500 points.

· I = 250 points

· O = 50 points

· U = 10 points

· X = 0 points

40 ft

40 ftZone 1Zone 3Zone 5Zone 7Zone 9Zone 11

West

Wall

(Plumbin

g Wall of

Building)

Zone 2Zone 4Zone 6Zone 8Zone 10Zone 12Loading Bay Doors

South Wall (Front of

Building)

Front Enterance

with Glass

Windows