Suppose you work for the Pittsburgh Steel Company. Your company specializes in rolling specialty steel alloys and titanium. Material is purchased in slabs that may be up to 6 inches thick and is rolled into plates (about 0.5 inches thick) and sheets (.060 to 0.25 inches thick). Pittsburgh Steel Company's marketing strategy is to fill smaller orders that their competitors cannot produce profitably and to specialize in orders for materials that are difficult to process (like certain steel alloys, etc.) You have been given the assignment of improving the layout of their existing facility. Currently the facility has three hot rolling mills, two large walking beam furnaces (these feed the hot rolling mills), shearing equipment, saws for rough cutting slab material, a pickling house (used for de-scaling of the material), and two annealing furnaces.
a. Describe some of the information that you would need in order to create a new layout for the facility and explain how you would obtain this information. Be as specific as possible. In addition, discuss what some of the special considerations and constraints might be in designing this layout.
b. Your boss wants to know if a product, process, or group technology layout would be the best choice in this setting. How would you answer her? How would you arrive at that conclusion?