i was wondering if anyone would be able to provide me with some tips on how to perform a shipping lane alignment in a distribution center.
the way our facility works is that products come down conveyor belts or (lanes) and are loaded into respective trailer by operators (one trailer for one lane). operators are assigned a number of lanes which they need to load into the trucks (each lane has a different output some operators need to spend more time in some lanes than others). our facility has 90 of these trailers therefore 90 lanes being shipped at a time. we have set a standard for each operator to unload per hour which he needs to meet. the question is if there is a technique which would be able to optimize the operation in terms of cost and the number of operators used. the way i was thinking about the problem is too use a line balancing method in which the operator would be considered as a workstation and each lane would be considered as a task with a deterministic task time. our standard would then be considered as a the cycle time. the problem with this approach however is that it does not consider the walking time from lane to lane which would obviously increase as more lanes (tasks) are assigned to each operator.
Please let me know if there are any other approaches to the problem.
I am a fairly new industrial engineer so forgive me if the solution might be obvious.
thanks for any possible input and ideas!
the way our facility works is that products come down conveyor belts or (lanes) and are loaded into respective trailer by operators (one trailer for one lane). operators are assigned a number of lanes which they need to load into the trucks (each lane has a different output some operators need to spend more time in some lanes than others). our facility has 90 of these trailers therefore 90 lanes being shipped at a time. we have set a standard for each operator to unload per hour which he needs to meet. the question is if there is a technique which would be able to optimize the operation in terms of cost and the number of operators used. the way i was thinking about the problem is too use a line balancing method in which the operator would be considered as a workstation and each lane would be considered as a task with a deterministic task time. our standard would then be considered as a the cycle time. the problem with this approach however is that it does not consider the walking time from lane to lane which would obviously increase as more lanes (tasks) are assigned to each operator.
Please let me know if there are any other approaches to the problem.
I am a fairly new industrial engineer so forgive me if the solution might be obvious.
thanks for any possible input and ideas!