Methodical Approach to Factory Planning Regarding a Lean Production System

Factory planning has been developed from a unique and infrequently performed activity to a permanent management task with an immense complexity. Furthermore the meaning of human-social and organizational aspects becomes more crucial, because of the linkage of different processes (e.g. product development and oder processing). A new type of lean production system (LPS), that is currently implemented in many european enterprises, offers a holistic approach to arrange enterprise-specifically methods in order to design the production in a comprehensive and consistent way. Now, the challenge of factory planning is to configure the elements of the factory in a way, that they support the fulfilment of the purposes of the production system in the best possible way. Based on the described challenges for factory planning, this paper offers a methodology to identify and illustrate the influences of the elements of an LPS on the elements of a factory. These influences are structured in a matrix. Therefore the interdependencies between the requirement areas (methods/tools of an LPS) and the scopes for design (elements of a factory) are structured hierarchically by various levels.