Process Village

Grouping activities by type rather than in the order required to design or make a product. 

Traditionally, most organizations created process villages for activities ranging from shop floor grinding to office credit control. Lean organizations are trying to replace process villages with process sequences for product families whenever possible. 

The illustration below shows two classifications of bicycle factories. One involves a process village, while in the other the material flow follows the process sequence. 

process village
Layout process village (above) versus layout process sequence by product family (below)
process sequence

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