Factory Layout Design and Optimization

Background

Poor material flow is one of the most common reasons a factory underperforms its rated capacity, bottlenecked stations sit idle waiting on upstream processes, while others run past their reliable duty cycle and fail more often than they should. This project set out to design a full factory layout for a chocolate processing line and then prove, through simulation, whether that layout actually delivers efficient material handling and throughput before a single wall gets built.

Design Procedure

The starting point was mapping the complete production sequence that raw cocoa beans have to pass through, destoning and cleaning, winnowing, roasting, refining, conching, tempering, and moulding, before moving on to quality assurance and packaging. Around that core line, I laid out the supporting spaces a working plant actually needs, which include raw material receiving and storage silos, a warehouse zone, control rooms for line monitoring, an HR office, and a staff dining area, and routed the main material path (the red conveyor line) through the building so that every station sits in the order material actually needs to visit it, rather than the order that was convenient to draw.

Analysis

To test whether that layout held up under real operating conditions, I built the plant as a discrete-event simulation model, with each piece of equipment; silos, mixers, roaster, refining and tempering machines, moulders, cleaners, all modeled as a resource object with its own processing time, failure behavior, and queue. Running the simulation surfaced exactly where the design broke down: the resource utilization statistics showed stations like the bean intake machines, the couching/conching machine, the mixer, and the moulding and tempering machines spending a meaningful share of their time in a failed state rather than working, which pointed directly to where buffering, redundancy, or maintenance scheduling needed to be reconsidered in the layout.

Optimization

Using those statistics, I went back into the layout and adjusted station placement, storage capacity, and material routing to reduce the impact of those failure-prone stations on the rest of the line, keeping downstream stations fed even when an upstream machine went down, instead of letting one failure stall the whole process.

The result was a factory layout that isn't just a floor plan, but one that's been stress-tested in simulation against real throughput and reliability data, with material handling routes and station placement optimized to keep the line running at its highest sustainable output.

Skills Developed

• Machine Shop and Factory Layout Design

• Material Handling Optimization

• Industrial Engineering

• Supply Chain and Procurement

Software Used

• Technomatix Plant Simulations

• Simens

• SolidWorks

• MATLAB