Una-Dyn Internship

Manufacturing Plant Layout

The main project I worked on at Universal Dynamics was defining an efficient material and process flow for a new plant. I did this over the course of two summers. The first summer I mainly spent doing time studies of assemblies and processes as well as value stream mapping the old plant site.

The old plant was comprised of two buildings. The value stream at the manufacturing site bounced back and forth between these building which required a significant amount of unnecessary motion. By evaluating the value stream, these wastes became glaringly apparent and were the main target for change at a systems level. At an individual process level, time studies allowed for evaluation of manufacturing cell layout. Because there was no convenient way to pull parts movement was also an issue in manufacturing cells.

While mapping the value stream I was able to take inventory of the machines and stations in use as well as determining choke points that were causing waste in waiting. Because the new location had yet to be determined, the only other work that could be done regarding the project the first summer was to determine racking and warehouse requirements as well as determining how to most efficiently organize part locations on shelves.

At the beginning of the second summer there was a lot of touring facilities and evaluating their viability for the companies use. The plant space shown in the image below was the best candidate and the building that was eventually purchased. The majority of the second summers work on this project primarily consisted of determining how to best utilize the space and how to overcome its limitations. By designing new layouts and proposing them to my boss Patrick Graham, we were able to iterate different configurations eventually ending with a design similar to this.

Unfortunately I do not have the Revit files I created while working on this project and this scan of a printout is the only artifact of the project that I have. However later in the year after my second summer at Universal Dynamics I heard from my former boss that they had moved into the new space and implemented the layout that I had worked on. Apparently it has been working well for them.