Thesis Archive
A facilities plan layout for the new campus site of TRACE college in fort bonifacio (2006)
Samoy, Tangtatco
Abstract:
-This study sought to apply facility planning concepts, designed or created for manufacturing facilities, to a service facility which for this case is a school – TRACE College. Currently, TRACE College is situated at Guadalupe and because of the current demand for nurses and the closing down of non-compliant nursing schools; the TRACE has decided to put up a nursing school inclusive of its current courses in Fort Bonifacio. The lot in Fort Bonifacio was already acquired by the company; the only thing left undone is the facility layout design of their campus. To have a suitable or “process-friendly” layout, certain factors were considered in the planning and development of the campus. Factors include: (1) forecasted number of enrollees, (2) size of the lot, (3) manpower required, (4) Commission on Higher Education (CHED) requirements, (5) process flow, (6) zoning, (7) government and architectural Standards (area and space requirements), and (8) activity interrelationship among the different facilities. The current organizational structure and processes of TRACE College, Guadalupe was evaluated in terms of its effectiveness and suggestions were proposed to address these. Of the 6,446.51 square meter lot that already bought by the school, only 4231.9 square meters was utilized. This number is inclusive of the 5-storey building, the sports complex, and the available parking area inside the campus. The area utilized and specified or identified was based on CHED, architectural, and government standards regarding space and area requirements taking into consideration the forecasted total student population of the school. Zoning was done to divide the different facilities into floors. The top floors were dedicated mostly for the academic needs of the students like the classrooms, laboratories, and also facilities that will least likely frequented by people like the conference room and the auditorium. Concurrently, most of the facilities were assigned to the first floor. An optimization software called, Visual Factory was used to expedite or facilitate the generation of alternative layouts for the first floor. These alternatives were then evaluated based on the degree to which the activity relationships were followed and the total distance traveled between departments that were deemed necessary to be close to each other. From this, a proposed layout was easily chosen for both criteria produced the same conclusion (i.e. for the activity relationship criterion: the first alternative had a relationship score of 1295 while the second alternative had 1265; for the total distance criterion: the total distance traveled for the first alternative is 172.6 meters less than the total distance for the second alterative). After which, individual layouts for the different rooms or departments were designed. Ergonomic considerations such as lighting or illumination and temperature standards were suggested so as to make the design of their rooms more conducive to learning. Lastly, the financial aspect of the project and the proposed solutions were assessed. Financial statements (i.e., balance sheets and income statements) were projected or estimated for the school’s first 10 years of operations. Accordingly, the project was deemed viable for the computed net present value is Php216,840,825 and its internal rate of return is relatively high at 28.31% compared to the discount rate of 10%.