The Workplace Planner takes the hassle out of diagramming operator walk paths, calculating station cycle times and walk distances, determining LEAN work content, and evaluating ergonomic lift and carry issues.

Working within AutoCAD, the Workplace Planner automatically generates Walk-path diagrams and calculates worker walk times, lean value-added percentages, travel distances, and ergonomic safety assessments. Walk-path diagrams and animation help visualize the process directly on the layout in AutoCAD.

Users can evaluate as many layout configurations and flow diagrams necessary to arrive at the best integration of process and layout.

Improve Workplace Analysis

Unlike manual workstation analyses with paper and pen, Workplace Planner makes quick and easy work of generating accurate walk path diagrams. With Workplace Planner, you can keep drawings up to date with simple modification of your previous work.

Incorporating process times (predetermined or observed), walk times, LEAN, and ergonomic assessments into one calculator eliminates guessing and enables engineers to analyze cycle times, value-added work percentages, and ergonomic issues for the proposed workplace.

Workplace Planner can evaluate simultaneous operations in linked work stations to see how changes in process times will impact downstream operations. With Workplace Planner you can set up each workstation for the best line-side presentation of parts to reduce the time spent walking and improve efficiency of manual operations!

Combine Layout with Process using Excel

Creating new workplace studies or modifying existing ones can be done in just a few minutes. The Workplace Planner uses your existing workstation layout drawing and imports process steps and routings from a Microsoft Excel text file.

The simple comma-separated data file can also be created from within Proplanner or generated from other labor time estimation applications. Since the Workplace Planner reads and writes text files, users can quickly modify the spreadsheet and immediately calculate the impacts of process changes on cycle time and percent of value-added work.

Link to MTM and MODAPTS

The Workplace Planner is the first workstation analysis tool that combines pre-determined labor times from organizations such as MTM and MODAPTS with AutoCAD-based workstation layout drawings to create walk-path diagrams. Workplace Planner can interpret standard work codes from work measurement systems to calculate processing and walk times. The Workplace Planner will also automatically create Action and Walk parameter values for predetermined walk activities to improve your study accuracy; effortlessly.

Stationary and Moving Parts

The Workplace Planner can model both stationary layouts and workplaces where parts are moving on a conveyor. The moving part capability helps you quickly compute and diagram operators walking to and from moving parts on straight or multi-segmented paths. A built-in animation feature allows you to see operators moving in the workplace and performing tasks at locations. This quick-animation feature greatly improves the evaluation, understanding and communication of the workstation-based process for managers and line personnel.

Analyze Multiple Workers, LEAN, & ERGO

Workplace Planner can diagram walk-paths, compute and chart value-added (LEAN) work content percentages and evaluate Lift and Carry ergonomic requirements for up to 10 workers simultaneously. It can also synchronize up to 3 workers at a time when work is performed that requires workers to collaborate. Finally, the Workplace Planner can export all of the information back to Proplanner, Microsoft Excel or other work measurement applications for data management or further analysis.

Features

• Automatically create flow paths and manually create user-defined paths
• Analyze up to 1000 flow paths and up to 25 operators concurrently
• Automatically scale path segment thickness according to walk intensity, and create variable-sized flow path arrows and distance labels
• Evaluate MODAPTS, MTM-1/UAS/B and user defined process time codes, or interface with Proplanner, Microsoft Excel and other standard work measurement systems to evaluate additional labor time standards
• Automatically compute LEAN value-added %
• Import and Export from / to Excel CSV files
• Analyze walk flow paths from and to moving parts on multi-segment part paths
• Evaluate Lift and Carry of weight according to the OSHA approved “SNOOK” method
• Animate operator walk flows in 2D or 3D for stationary or moving parts (2D only in standalone)
• Synchronize up to 3 workers concurrently and diagram operator walk paths with unique colors per operator

Benefits

• 2D or 3D outputs are easy to understand and suggest improvement possibilities. They look professional and are good to show anybody who is not familiar with the setup, how the system works.
• Excel data input and output makes the program simple to use and more versatile at dealing with data. This also adds to the numbers of ways that data can be inputted, adding to the user-friendliness of the program.
• Time needed is greatly reduced by automatically generated workpaths and calculation of variables.
• Use of MTM and MODAPTS codes speed process and walk time calculation and add recognizability to the data.
• Stationary and moving parts along with multiple operator integration makes accurately representing the real world more manageable.
• LEAN analysis is a must in today's work place and this feature can save your company large amounts of money by helping reduce and prevent worker injuries.