Faced with lower sales volumes and under-utilized manufacturing facilities, the customer needed to develop a consolidation plan in less than one month.

IET engineers joined the customer’s project team in conducting the required analysis. The customer identified which operations in each facility had to be kept and which ones were destined for outsourcing or elimination. At the outset, IET employed its expertise in facility redesign to understand floor space requirements and volumes by production and storage area. The next step involved developing alternative layouts with associated advantages and disadvantages. The entire team evaluated the alternatives and selected the one that best met their goals for timeliness, cost and future growth potential.

Having worked with the customer on several prior engagements, IET quickly grasped the process flow issues that would be essential to a smoothly functioning redesigned facility. The required production floor space dictated that a satellite facility would be part of the consolidated operations. IET’s recommendation relied on moving all ship-from-stock inventories to an off-site distribution center thereby freeing valuable floor space for production operations. Concentrating production operations in one facility allowed the customer to avoid adding new production support overhead. The customer was able to acquire a nearby facility to perform distribution operations and then proceeded to consolidate the remaining production operations into their primary facility in 12 months.