Industrial Engineering
Eleven kilometres a day, walked by someone paid to do something else. Relayout only removes the walking half.
— /year
Labour consumed by material transport
The saving is deliberately calculated on the walking portion only, because moving departments closer does nothing to the loading and unloading at each end — a relayout justified on total movement cost will disappoint by roughly the handling share. Recovered minutes are also only worth their labour rate if the person can do something productive with them; where movement is a dedicated material handler's whole job, the saving is real headcount and where it is fragments of many operators' time, it usually is not. Trip counts should come from an observed sample rather than an estimate, since infrequent long hauls are consistently under-remembered.
Factory Floor Spaghetti Diagram Distance-to-Cost Converter — free, with the formula and a worked example, at Textile School.