11. Office Layout and Personnel Planning

This chapter starts with an overview of office spatial design and follows with detailed information on spatial guidelines for office activities and their space and equipment needs. Next it provides an overview of ways of organizing the office activities and of typical arrangements in the office layout, such as office landscaping and open office plans. This chapter discusses a case study involving the design of offices for an urban power and light company, whose alternative layouts were compared with simulation to provide a quantitative evaluation of the office layout design process. Simulation models of these office layouts are available for viewing on the textbook’s website. Sections IV and V of the factory design project are illustrated with the selected product. The chapter ends with the presentation of an excel program for the calculation of the unit cost of the product.