The effect of layout design on productivity: an empirical study

This paper presents a comparative study that uses simulation to investigate the performance of different layout designs with respect to different levels of model and head count variability. There are three types of layout designs being examined in this paper: flow line, job shop and cellular layout. These three layouts are evaluated based on three selected performance measures which are throughput time, lateness and labour productivity. These three performance measures are selected because they relate with the overall layout productivity. The simulation model is build by using the WITNESS simulation package and the simulation results are tested in the F‐test and Newman‐Keuls test. In this study, the radio‐cassette player production system has been used as an empirical study. The results show that the effect of headcount variability and model variability do create an impact towards the performance of flow line, job shop and cellular layout.