Video Transcript:
In addition to unit loader tugger studies which you can see in our other videos, you can perform relationship layout planning studies in Flow Planner.
Within Flow Planner you can design and evaluate multiple layouts using Richard Mother's systematic layout planning techniques in a fraction of the time it would take to do by hand. In the Products tab of Flow Planner, you define your relationship types.
In this case, A signifies absolute importance and X is an undesirable relationship. The quantity field represents the relative importance factors between relationship types. In the part routings time, you can define the relationship type for each significant location pairing and assign a reason code along with it. You see here that all of the A relationships are grouped together, all the E relationships together, and so forth.
You can create and edit the study within Flow Planner or import an excel file in the same format into Flow Planner. Flow Planner will then calculate a score for the layout in this study a low score is desired we'll come back to this particular score in a minute.
Changing the path thickness lets you distinguish the relationship line not only by color but also by thickness. Flow Planner will generate a legend so you can easily keep track of the color significance on your drawing as you change and filter your diagram. It will also automatically create a relationship chart which can be helpful for presentation purposes. As you can see here this is the standard chart that would be created at the beginning of any relationship planning study.
You can filter your diagram by any number of fields. we'll take a look at the A relationship only now we can focus on the location relationships with the most importance. If we move a few locations to reduce the distance between the A relationship points we can see a score for the new layout.
Note that the previous score was 113 thousand points, the A relationships and the new lower score indicates that the distance between the A relationship has been reduced however the overall score has increased from it so we three hundred ninety-seven thousand score.
To improve the entire diagram, you can continue the process of isolating relationship types and reducing their individual scores. In the end, you'll be able to create and improve the layout for your entire facility and present your results in a clean and professional manner.
