Fractal layout organization for job shop environments

Manufacturing facilities have traditionally been organized by process or function (with each cell having workstations of a particular process) or by product (with cells specialized for one or more jobs). This paper develops a new fractal alternative for manufacturing job shops which allocates the total number of workstations for most processes equally across several fractal cells. One result is enormous flexibility because each cell can produce nearly every product. The number of workstations required also approaches the minimum found with function organizations because stations are not dedicated to a product or group. Still, the spatial distribution of workstations for different processes that results from placing some in each cell keeps travel and material handling burdens in fractal designs nearly as low as those of product organizations. This paper introduces fractal organization of job shops and looks at it in-depth from a production systems design perspective, placing an emphasis on identifying the advantages of the fractal organization. It also briefly discusses the process of implementing fractal designs, and illustrates an application to job shops with a case example.