July/August 1994
Your operation’s productivity relies in part on facility design. Here are some tips on ensuring that your plant layout is as efficient as possible.
By Kent Kiser
Kent Kiser is an associate editor of Scrap Processing and Recycling.
Is your plant as efficient as it could be?
If your operation is like most, the answer to that question is probably not.
The fact is, the founders of most of today’s scrap recycling companies didn’t spend much time anguishing over plant layout issues. As a result, the majority of scrap plants have tended to grow willy-nilly, adding a new piece of equipment here, a new building there. In other words, these facilities haven’t been designed, they’ve simply evolved.
But, faced with rising labor, equipment, and operating costs, as well as rising competition for materials, recyclers increasingly are looking for every possible way to reduce their costs and increase the efficiency of their operations. And effective plant layout is an integral part of these efforts. After all, the way your plant is layed out has a direct effect on the efficiency and productivity of your operations.
Like all manufacturing operations, scrap recycling plants should be configured to streamline and expedite, first, the delivery and processing of raw materials and, second, the shipment of finished products. So how do you determine just how well your plant layout meets this goal? As a first step, some recyclers suggest drawing a diagram or building a simple scale model of your facility to give you a bird's-eye view of how your buildings, equipment, scrap inventory, traffic routes, and rail siding work in relationship to each other. "Look at it as an exercise, a hypothetical game, and ask yourself: Where do I stand now" What do I stand to gain or lose by changing my layout?" advises Scott Horne, president of EnviResource Management Group (Silver Spring, Md.), a scrap industry consulting fin-n. "Sometimes you can quantify the pros and cons in terms of dollars, but even if you can't, this exercise should help you see if it makes sense to change anything."
Stuck in Traffic
Of course, in order for this assignment to work, you'll need to keep some principles of efficiency in mind. For instance, most recyclers and consultants will tell you the same thing: Traffic flow represents the biggest potential problem in scrap plant layouts and, hence, should be a top priority. Plus, good plant layout isn't just an efficiency issue, it's also a customer service issue, so it's essential for your facility to offer easy and quick ingress and egress, notes S. Terry Coker, vice president of Sunbelt Technologies Inc. (Dallas), an equipment services fin-n. "The key to success in the future is going to be taking care of your customers," he asserts, "and that means getting them in, unloaded, paid, and out as fast as possible. To achieve this goal-and the efficiency that comes with it-keep the following factors in mind.
Get 'Em In. Suppliers should be able to enter your plant easily, without having to sit in a traffic jam on the main road or wait long to be weighed in. You can mitigate these problems by constructing an exit lane off the main road prior to your entrance or by providing adequate space between the road and your scale to accommodate several trucks. Since backups can also be caused by having all suppliers--industrial and retail--enter through the same scale, some recyclers recommend having separate lanes for these different customers. Others even go so far as to maintain separate but close-by operations for peddlers and industrial accounts.
Go With the Flow. Traffic should flow in a continuous, mono-directional circuit through your operation to eliminate the need for trucks to back up, backtrack, or intersect with opposing traffic, says Alan Ratner, executive vice president of Sims-LMC Recyclers (Richmond, Calif.). For a primo example of what he means by monodirectional flow, think of your nearest fast-food drive-in setup.
In a perfect mono-directional world, every scrap plant would have its entrance and exit located on different sides of the facility and use separate scales to weigh suppliers in and out. The industry norm, however, is far from this ideal. Most scrap plants move incoming and outgoing traffic through the same scale in a one-truck-in/one-truck-out system, which inevitably creates bottlenecks.
One possible option is to have your entrance and exit on opposite sides of your scale house, again using separate but connected scales. Some recyclers are already using this approach successfully, but such two-scale systems can be an ethical hot potato. "You must give your customers an unquestionable sense that both scales are accurate," says Bill Baumgartner, president of W.Z. Baumgartner & Associates Inc. (Brentwood, Tenn.), an environmental consulting firm. As Horne points out, however, "with the new electronic, computerized scales, that sort of worry isn't as much of a problem." Also, according to the U.S. Office of Weights and Measures (Gaithersburg, Md.), there are no federal or state laws prohibiting businesses from using two-scale weigh-in/weigh-out systems, though a few states forbid operators from using stored tare weights to weigh in and out their suppliers' vehicles.
Ethical issues aside, the main drawback to the two-scale approach boils down to cost. Nevertheless, the up-front costs could be more than offset by efficiency gains. As Ted Lipman, president of Denbo Scrap Materials Inc. (Pulaski, Tenn.), asserts, "It's a luxury to have two scales, but it's an ideal situation."
Direct That Traffic. To ensure smooth traffic flow through your plant, your suppliers need to know exactly where to deliver their material. While the scale master can do double-duty as traffic director, some recyclers prefer to have one or more truck greeters inside their plant grounds to steer suppliers in the right direction. "In our plants, customers are never allowed to go wherever they want," Ratner points out. "They're always directed by someone." Directional signs placed at strategic locations can also help ensure that suppliers deliver their scrap to the proper area, which can reduce sorting and material handling problems later.
Keep the Coast Clear. "A big problem in plant layout, especially around ferrous operations, is designating roads and keeping them clean," Horne says. "You don't want to have piles of scrap impeding the traffic or processing flow." And a clear path will do more than speed traffic through your plant; it can also prevent your suppliers' vehicles from suffering tire damage and calm similar customer-service concerns.
Get 'Em Out. After suppliers have emptied their trucks, they should be able to resume their movement in a continuous circuit toward the exit. "You should try to allow enough space to have truck turnarounds and unloading areas that are adequate for today's larger trucks," Horne suggests. And once suppliers get to the exit and are weighed out, they'll need parking room if they must wait for payment, thus keeping them out of the flow of other incoming and outgoing traffic.
Processing Practicalities
After thinking about how to get your suppliers in and out efficiently, consider how you can ensure that the scrap they deliver flows through your operation equally well.
Get Organized. One key to efficient processing is to keep your operations organized, which means giving each processing area-torching, shearing, baling, shredding, and so on-its own clearly defined space. "There can be quite a bit of interference between many operations," Horne explains, "so it's a good idea to keep equipment far enough apart so you don't have different operations flowing into each other."
Your scrap inventory should also be well-organized. Many recyclers, for example, devote one part of their plant to nonferrous and another to ferrous. Within these broad categories, they then segregate their scrap by grade, establishing open spaces or physical dividers between different grades to prevent mixing and cross-contamination of materials. "If you look at sophisticated scrap plants," Coker says, "they have their grades of scrap separated in the plant so they can move material to a specific location quickly." Without this kind of organization, scrap recyclers may pay a heavy price in terms of diminished efficiency, as Coker can attest. "I've seen hours being eaten up because processors couldn't get to the scrap or get it to their machine, or because it was at the wrong place at the wrong time," he says.
Stop Handling the Scrap! The most important efficiency rule in scrap processing, many industry executives agree, is to minimize the number of times material is handled before, during, and after processing. This is a layout issue because how your operations are configured often determines how many times you have to handle your inventory through the processing, storage, and shipping stages.
To keep handling to a minimum, you could have your suppliers dump their incoming scrap directly into a storage hopper or, better yet, onto the infeed conveyors of your processing equipment, thus saving you from having to move the scrap to the proper location or feed it into the processing equipment. On the other end, the processed scrap could be conveyed directly into a waiting railcar, barge, or truck. No fuss, no muss, and virtually no handling required by you, the recycler.
While some processors have achieved something close to this ideal, the vast majority still do their share of hefting scrap around their plants. So, in a more realistic world, the thing to keep in mind is that suppliers should offload material close enough to the appropriate processing machine so that your handling equipment can easily and directly feed it into the machine or onto its infeed conveyors.
Placement Is Everything. The number of times you have to handle your scrap is, in large part, a function of how and where your equipment is located. According to Ted Lipman, the golden rule of equipment placement is that "you need to place your machinery so it can be fed most expeditiously with incoming material and, at the same time, so you can most-easily ship material out by rail, truck, or water vessel." If you operate a shredder and ship primarily by rail, for instance, you'd want to position the machine so it can discharge frag directly into railcars. "Many recyclers have to truck scrap across their own yards, which is crazy," Horne says. To avoid such problems, he advises, "identify how you're going to ship materials in advance and locate your equipment accordingly."
Think Small. While space is important to an efficient traffic flow and operations organization, it can work against individual processing areas. Many recyclers suggest, therefore, that you should keep your processing areas as compact as possible, ensuring that the handling machinery and personnel have everything they need within easy reach.
An Office With a View. If at all possible, build your scale house and offices elevated above ground level, Horne and Ratner recommend. "You have to be able to see what's going on without having to rely on walking to each area," Ratner says. "It makes life a lot easier when you can see a lot of your plant from your window." Second-floor scale houses also enable the scale master to do a preliminary inspection of incoming loads. Furthermore, Horne says, being above the action offers you a regular opportunity to see just how efficiently your plant is layed out. "People may think it's for the nice view, but there's a purpose behind it."
Time for a Change?
"OK," you might be saying, "layout concerns are easy to address if you're starting from scratch, but what about when you're talking about my 50-year-old operation in downtown Anytown?" It's true that existing operations face more difficult and, in some cases, impossible obstacles than greenfield operations. "A lot of older scrap yards are locked into a situation, and they can't do much about it," says Coker. Still, he adds, "almost any yard can be changed and improved. The more astute operations, the ones that want to be in the scrap business 10 years from now, are making the kind of changes we're talking about."
But change doesn't come without a price, and when you're talking about layout changes, the price comes, in part, in the form of equipment-moving expenses. As Baumgartner notes wryly, "Recyclers with established plants don't move shears and balers with a great deal of enthusiasm."
Even so, Ratner, for one, points out that his firm will recommend moving equipment "if it's a long-term decision based on efficiency." Another industry executive follows the same philosophy, remarking that 11 equipment changeovers can pay for themselves in a short time."
Plant layout changes also cost in terms of operating disruptions. "Certain parts of your business may have to be out of commission for a while during redesign and relocation," Horne says. "The ideal situation would be to do all your changes at once, but most of these projects have to be phased in."
If you do decide to make layout changes, it's imperative to first "sit down and truly plan out what you want to do and plan a timeline of how you're going to do it," Horne advises. Then, you have to allot enough time to make the changes in each area. You've got to have the commitment to do the job," he stresses.
While it may be difficult, even painful, to ponder layout changes, the alternative is to risk falling behind the competition due to inefficiencies created, at least in part, by your current plant setup. The decision whether to make changes is a personal one, and the right answer will vary from company to company. Still, a large part of it "has to do with how forward-thinking you are," Baumgartner says. "You can no longer just say you'll keep doing things a certain way simply because you've done them that way in the past." •
Your operation’s productivity relies in part on facility design. Here are some tips on ensuring that your plant layout is as efficient as possible.