[philipov]

Playing games like Satisfactory and Factorio also forces you to come to terms with the imperfection of living systems. The first time you play, you can't possibly know how big you need the factory to be, and you don't have the tech unlocked for a lategame factory anyway. You just have to admit that you'll build a temporary facility now, and build a new one after you've unlocked the tech you'll need to scale up.

[cratermoon]

So you're saying you'll need to re-factor the facility as you gain more knowledge and resources?

[wheelinsupial]

I haven't played those games, but it does happen in real manufacturing facilities.

A facility I worked at started off in low volume, high mix manufacturing (a job shop) and eventually moved into more high volume, medium mix manufacturing. What makes sense for low volume doesn't make sense when you move to high volume.

"Refactoring" happens at different levels. You can look at the entire facility, specific product lines, or specific machines. Generally you care about efficiency and yield. Safety is baked into everything you're doing, so sometimes you need to sacrifice efficiency or yield for greater operator safety.

You can have a product line with initially low sales volume, so you use less efficient or less tooling and automation heavy processes. As your volume increases, you can start to invest in new tooling, machinery, move the production to existing machines, or change the shop floor layout. For example, you can move from hand clamping some pieces for welding, dedicated fixtures / jigs to clamp and hold the parts, up to using robot welding machines for high production volumes.

You can have machines set up for batch processing as independent operations. If it makes sense through having higher volume, you can dedicate a specific set of machines and move them into a production cell.

At a machine level, you can realize that yield is too low and you can look at the design of the tooling or look at the sequencing of operations if it's a CNC machine.

Similar things happen for service operations. It makes sense to have someone manually process or copy and paste some stuff if it's low volume. Once it ramps up, it can make sense to automate in Excel with VBA and then eventually move to a more dedicated program.