Impacts of layout design on achievement to the world class production: Case study in automotive industries

The obvious characteristics of manufacturing firms are equipment, machinery and their operator´s technical skills. Integration and coordination of these characteristics has a great impact on productivity and flexibility of the organization. Optimized organization´s designs - besides to modern equipment - can meet the rapid changes in the environment and contribute to the agility and dynamism of the organization provided that the organization has motivated, creative and skilled staff. The paper is to identify how operations management strategies can be made relevant to achieve world class production. The question is which problems the management may encounter when it wants to establish a global management of the manufacturing, more systematically for world class production. Staff motivation has a great impact on exploitation of the machinery and facilities. Analyzing the relationships between the efficiency of production processes with layout design and installation of manufacturing machinery have been highly considered by manufacturing engineers and managers, but their concentration has mostly been on the technical aspects of production. As a result, combined layouts such as Group Technology (GT) and Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) have been devised. However, in spite of its great impact on production efficiency, considering motivation and collaboration morale has been neglected. This paper concentrates on staff motivation and collaboration morale in two different layout designs, Layout by Product and Layout by Fixed-Position.