Benefits of Organizing Your Facility’s Equipment

Although you may be tempted to simply dump computers and printers out on your facility’s shop floor, this careless conduct won’t do you any favors. The layout and design of your facility can greatly impact how work is conducted within the space. By integrating the needs of people (employees as well as customers, clients, and staff), materials, and machinery, you can create a well-functioning workplace system. To better understand the benefits of organizing your facility’s equipment and to explore some of the factors involved in an excellent organizational setup, please scroll down.

Benefits of Organizing Your Facility’s Equipment

Investing time, money, and creativity into the organization of your facility’s shop floor will help you maintain an orderly environment. A little effort now can pay off enormously in the future. Although facilities vary in size and system, every workplace can profit from careful coordination and a solid structure. The following are some of the many benefits of organizing your facility’s equipment:

• Improve Productivity: By organizing your facility’s equipment on the shop floor, you can maximize the effectiveness of the production process. This will keep workers productive and perhaps ease lines of communication.
• Preserve and Protect Assets: The placement of your equipment will affect its condition as well as the condition of surrounding items (carpets, floors, tile surfaces, other equipment). To preserve and protect your building’s assets, be sure to situate your equipment in a location that prevents excessive wear and extends the lifespans of assets.
• Allow for Change: Taking the time to organize your facility well now can prevent the need for future redesigns. If you implement a flexible design that can meet changing needs, you can ease the way for future expansions and adaptations.
• Increase Flow: An excellent organizational scheme will increase the flow of movement on your shop floor, meeting the needs of your employees and ensuring that the process is orderly, efficient, and ideally quite simple. This flow will help you avoid backtracking, which can help you prevent complicated coordination (and confusion) and ensure that parts aren’t lost in the commotion.
• Utilize Space: How well do you utilize all of the space your facility provides? With first-rate organization, you can ensure that traffic lanes are wide enough and utilize all of your vertical storage space (a frequently under-appreciated area).
• Enhance Safety: When equipment is improperly spaced, crowded together, situated on an unsteady surface, or not adequately protected from the environment, it can threaten the safety of personnel. Use organization to enable your business to operate in a safe manner in accordance with all applicable legal guidelines.
• Improve Aesthetics and Cleanliness: No one can deny that an orderly shop floor is more aesthetically pleasing; humans appreciate order and find beauty in tidiness. Plus, when a space is kept neat, it is far easier to maintain its cleanliness, which can improve employees’ health and happiness.
• Increase Morale: All of the benefits of organizing a facility’s shop floor can increase employee morale and job satisfaction. Your employees will appreciate the improved flow, enhanced safety, orderly aesthetics, and much more.
• Impress Visitors: Finally, if your facility welcomes many visitors, organizing your facility can be a marketing tool. It may impress prospective clients, customers, vendors, investors, and more.

How to Improve Your Facility’s Shop Floor Organization

Do you want to enjoy all of the benefits of organizing your facility’s equipment? With a few simple steps, you can improve the layout of your facility and increase productivity on the shop floor.

Assess how you’re currently utilizing the facility’s space. Where are items stored? What are the traffic patterns like? How does the total system flow? Ask your employees about their frustrations and concerns with the current design of the shop floor.

Focus on creating a smooth flow through the system, taking all aspects into consideration. For example, consider how traffic moves through the room, and work to create open paths that facilitate movement. In addition, ensure that there is sufficient air flow in the room. Not only will this prevent the space from feeling stuffy and oppressive, but it will help your equipment work properly.

Value your shop floor’s space. If you don’t need to store an item on the floor, consider removing it to maximize your space and minimize clutter. In addition, focus on placing your most useful and frequently used items in prime locations. For example, some companies tuck away computers and printers in offices, far away from the workstations in which they’re most needed, because they’re concerned about the technology’s safety in a rough factory environment. This wastes time, as employees must walk back and forth to the equipment. Instead of relegating vulnerable equipment to a safe but isolated location, purchase enclosures to safeguard the technology.

If you’re in the market for a computer enclosure, DustShield is here to help. The leader in industrial computer enclosures for production environments, DustShield has an extensive line of enclosures designed to protect LCD monitors, tower and desktop CPUs, and printers. Heavy-duty and delivered completely assembled, our enclosures suit a variety of applications. And if you can’t find the ideal product to suit your needs, we can design and fabricate a custom enclosure that meets your requirements. To learn more, please contact one of our enclosure specialists toll-free at 800-587-9557 or contact us online.