Technological kinship circles

This document describes a graphic group technology-based methodology for defining a new layout for an industrial production plant. This methodology (technological kinship circles) sought to optimise an industrial plant’s physical resources and minimise its production lead time through a new layout (i.e. an improvement and standardisation system) (Lara, 2007). The technological kinship circles methodology arose from the need for integrating manufacturing cells with defining their layout; this was achieved by implementing the rank order clustering (ROC) method (Singh,1996) for forming such cells and the single-linkage cluster ana- lysis (SLCA) method (Singh,1996) using the reciprocal of the coefficient of similarity for constructing the kinship circles defining the relative position of machines within the cells. Implementing this methodology and using group technology led to obtaining a new layout representing a 51% reduction in the average distances travelled by pieces during their processing and a 67% reduc- tion in average lead times for the production plant’s processes