Facility layout and material flowpath design are major factors in the productivity analysis of automated manufacturing systems.

Question:

Facility layout and material flowpath design are major factors in the productivity analysis of automated manufacturing systems. Facility layout is concerned with the location arrangement of machines and buffers for work-in-process. Flowpath design is concerned with the direction of manufacturing material flows (e.g., unidirectional or bidirectional; Lee, Lei, and Pinedo, Annals of Operations Research, 1997). A manufacturer of printed circuit boards is interested in evaluating two alternative existing layout and flowpath designs. The output of each design was monitored for 8 consecutive working days. The data (shown below) are saved in the file. Design 2 appears to be superior to Design 1. Do you agree? Explain fully.