What Is Layout?

Layout is the configuration of departments, work centers, and equipment, with particular emphasis on movement of work through the system (Stevenson et. al, 2014). It affects a company’s communication, material flow, warehousing, safety, service areas, employee morale, space utilization, flexibility and many more. It is one of the considerations in managing and developing the operations of a firm. There are thee basic types of layout: product layout, process layout and fixed-position layout.

In the article that I have read, the hospital specifically uses process layout. Process layout consists of a functional grouping of equipment or activities that do similar layouts. It was stated in the article that positive feedbacks were obtained after revising the layout of the hospital. An example of improvement in the layout is the position of sink in plain sight which can be a factor why the hospital’s infection rate and accident rate were lowered. It allows nurses and doctors to surely wash their hands that patients can watch them to do so which is antiseptic, cluttered and clinical. Possible reason is that the new layout made the hospital conducive to working which improves the staff performance. It also improves the mental health of the patients which can add to their recovery process.

Such layout is important to the operations of the hospital because it minimizes material handling costs by arranging the work centers. It is flexible and capable of handling low-volume wide-variety of products or services just like hospitals. It also lowers the investment in general purpose of equipment because specific and special types of equipments were needed for each process or function in the hospital. It is important to employee morale because the inherent diversity of jobs can increase the worker satisfaction.

The article just tells us the importance of layout to every business, whether you are service type or manufacturing