And, of course, if people are fully involved in generating solutions, they're more likely to adopt them..
Using expected market demand as well as the ongoing truss system designs, a process flow for fabrication was developed with initial layouts for arrangement and quantities of equipment.Most of this process is to be automated with some manual intervention for transport, quality assurance and painting; processes where automated stations are unnecessary or significantly expensive against provided benefit.. To provide a better understanding of the system, we built a time-based discrete event model to represent the process and provide key outputs for various sets of input parameters.
This allows the designers and stakeholders at an initial planning stage to see, digitally, how their assets could perform during production and provide feedback during the project at the earliest opportunities where large changes can be made to maximise value.. For the purposes of this project, operations upstream of raw material addition, and operations downstream of the final truss painting, were excluded from the simulation.The remaining process steps represented the core fabrication steps to transform raw materials into finished trusses, in addition to some of the largest investments in capital and automation and, therefore, the areas of highest interest.. We built the model itself in AnyLogic, primarily with the process modelling and material handling libraries.We drew a spatial representation of the factory to define the arrangement, quantity and sizing of process stations and travel routes (including conveyors and forklifts) as well as crane zones to facilitate movement of raw materials and assemblies through parts of the line.
We created a logic flow to define how all the raw materials and assembled trusses moved through the system, depending on their types and other parameters..Some aspects of the process were fixed, such as the quantity of welding stations and the routing of specific truss types (e.g.
truss type A and B can be processed in welding station 1).
Others, for example the painting bays, were left as flexible station areas to allow recording of the capacity over time.. Other input data included:.The idea of analysing the value landscape may not occur to most architects, designers or project managers; being more comfortable in focusing on the asset, the aesthetics, the technical details or the physical deliverables.
However, without this context there is an inevitability that the true opportunity for value delivery will never be achieved.. Our Design to Value book, gives many examples where a multitude of stakeholders are brought into the arena of problem definition, problem solving, and design.When this happens not only are exquisite solutions found, but there is positive change enacted through the engagement itself..
Professor John Dyson spent more than 25 years at GlaxoSmithKline, eventually ending his career as VP, Head of Capital Strategy and Design, where he focussed on developing a long-term strategic approach to asset management..While there, he engaged Bryden Wood and together they developed the Front End Factory, a collaborative endeavour to explore how to turn purpose and strategy into the right projects – which paved the way for Design to Value.