Optimizing Your Layouts for the Future

Layout optimization consulting is exactly what it sounds like: a consulting service that results in optimized layouts in a specified area of your plant.

While the definition is easy to understand, the time that goes into optimizing your layout—and what affects that time—can be difficult to understand. This misunderstanding can result in plants going it alone with their teams for a perceived gain in time without taking the appropriate steps to analyze and define how the long-term productivity and profitability can be best achieved. Layout optimization consultants are skilled at using their time, experts, and technology to ensure one thing for you: profitability.

We spoke with our experts to understand the benefits of layout optimization, the time required to realize those benefits, and some of the risks associated with not optimizing your layouts.

The Value of Layout Optimization

Layout optimization is about thinking forward and planning for your plant’s future. To target that goal, layout optimization addresses five main benefits.

“The benefits of layout optimization are footprint savings, line efficiency, reliability of your lines, risk reduction, and flexibility,” says Tiago Poletto, Intralox Activated Roller Belt (ARB) Solutions Seller. “At a lot of plants, risk reduction is the most critical benefit. Being able to understand the risks, plan for them, and in fact overcome them is very desirable.”

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Spending time with a layout optimization consultant reduces the time of each next step since you have full visibility and clarity on your priorities. Decisions that were once hard due to uncertainty become quick, easy, and risk-free. With an optimized layout and significantly lower risk, you will have more time to address other projects you may not have had time for before.

Time Is Money

Achieving these benefits does come with dedicated time; how much time comes down to your decisions. Have you initiated this project in its early phases or in the middle? How many conveyors are you looking to add to your layout? How long will the approval process take?

“From our perspective, we will typically involve solution sellers, customer service representatives, application engineers, project managers, test engineers, and an industry specialist team to ensure your project is as optimal as possible,” says Poletto. “Adding to that, at each of these stages, approvals are needed from the customer. But by having this many experts involved, there is confidence that your initial investment is the most reliable and most profitable for both the short and long term. There are still decisions that the customer needs to make, but now they can be made with all the information and implications being clear.”

What’s most time consuming is the revisions process. But with thorough revisions between your teams and the consultants’ teams, you'll know every step taken leads to decreased maintenance, replacements, downtime, and product damage costs, and increased profitability.

Layout Optimization Is High Stakes

Time spent with a partner on the front end reaps high rewards in the end. “When you optimize a layout, of course it is going to take time. But there is so much opportunity to gather more minds, more experts to dissect your layout. By looking more deeply into the solution, you allow yourself to think more clearly for the future,” says Poletto.

A trusted layout optimization consultant helps reduce the risk you assume on your project and increase your startup time. Together, you'll choose the right technology and equipment that will help you meet your goals. The right choices help you avoid increased maintenance costs, increased equipment costs with no knowledge of profitability, and overall decreased efficiency.

Optimize Your Layouts with the Right Partner

Layout optimization is well worth the time, and with the help of trusted, expert consulting, you can optimize your layouts with foresight and experience, unlocking opportunities using transformative technologies that could enable improved performance, profitability, and future-ready flexibility. By working with Intralox in the early stages of your project, you can achieve results not possible with traditional technologies.