A good facility layout is one of the important requirements for a manufacturing organization in order to maintain higher efficiencies. The present work illustrates a methodology for improving the layout of a facility consisting of c mini-cells to reduce material handling cost. This is accomplished by splitting the mini-cells.
Splitting the mini-cell involves splitting the number of machines of a mini-cell in such a way that both split mini-cells will have same machine types as the original mini-cell.
The present methodology uses the strategy of placing the mini-cell pairs that have higher material movement closer to each other to reduce the material handling cost of the layout.
The results show that both splitting the mini-cells once and multiple times reduce the material handling cost of the facility. Splitting mini-cells once is more efficient when compared with multiple splitting when considering the percentage improvement with the time in arranging the split mini-cells.