Building your facility layout

Your facility layout is Crown's picture of your plant: the areas material moves through, and where your equipment sits. It's optional to start with, but several features stay dark until it exists — the live plant-floor view, the traffic flow map, and the plant schematic in your preventive control plan all read from it.

Open Facility under Production. It has four tabs: Layout, Equipment, Map, and Traffic Flow.

Zones, positions, and containers

Crown describes a plant at three levels of detail. Use only as many as your records need:

• Zone — an area of the plant. Dry Storage, Production, Packaging.
• Position — a specific spot inside a zone. A numbered rack bay, a particular bench.
• Container — something that holds material. A tote, a tank, a bin.

Zone types

Each zone carries a type, grouped by how close it sits to exposed product:

• Food contact — receiving, storage, production, packaging, shipping.
• Food adjacent — quality, hold and quarantine, waste, chemical storage.
• Non-food — the rest of the building.

That grouping isn't cosmetic. It's the vocabulary your traffic flow map and your plant schematic use to show an inspector which areas need which controls, so it's worth setting honestly rather than marking everything production.

Crown QMSZones on the Layout tab

Building it

1. Set up the canvas

   On the Map tab, open facility setup to set your canvas dimensions and upload a floor-plan image to trace over, if you have one.

2. Add your zones

   On the Layout tab, select Add zone for each area of the plant. Name each one the way your team refers to it out loud, and set its type.

3. Add positions and containers where you need them

   Within a zone, add positions for specific spots and containers for vessels that hold material. Skip any level you won't actually record against.

4. Place your equipment

   On the Map tab, place your registered equipment where it physically sits. This is what turns the layout from a list into a picture.

Crown QMSEquipment placed on the map

What the layout unlocks

Building the layout isn't paperwork for its own sake. Four things start working once it exists:

• Storage zones on lots. Receiving and inventory can record where a lot is stored, so "where is it?" has an answer.
• The live plant floor. Your dashboard shows batches on the map, at the equipment they're running on. See Watching your plant floor live.
• Traffic flow. Movement routes are drawn over this layout. See Mapping traffic flow through your plant.
• Your preventive control plan. Section 6 uses the layout as the plant schematic. See Your preventive control plan document.

What's next

With equipment placed, the natural next step is mapping how material and people move between those areas. See Mapping traffic flow through your plant.