Current-Site Baseline Assessment

5.1 Inventorying Current Processes, Flows, and Operating Volumes

The first layer of the current-site baseline is the process inventory. The move team needs to know what work is performed at the existing facility, how that work flows, and what volumes the facility handles under normal, peak, and abnormal conditions. This inventory should include core and support activities: receiving, storage, staging, production, inspection, packaging, release, maintenance, waste handling, shipping, customer pickup, returns, records storage, employee services, and administrative support.

The process inventory should distinguish official processes from actual workflows. Standard operating procedures may describe how the site is supposed to run, but the move team must observe how it actually runs. This means walking the floor, following orders, tracing materials, shadowing employees, reviewing exception logs, and asking supervisors where the real constraints appear. A site can have a formal process map that looks clean while daily work depends on informal shortcuts, handwritten trackers, temporary staging areas, or unwritten sequencing rules.

Flow mapping is the next step. The team should map the movement of material, people, information, vehicles, visitors, samples, waste, tools, and exceptions. Material flow shows how inputs become outputs. People flow shows how employees move between workstations, break areas, locker rooms, offices, labs, and support spaces. Information flow shows how orders, schedules, quality approvals, inventory transactions, maintenance requests, customer instructions, and performance data move through the operation. Vehicle flow shows truck, forklift, yard, van, visitor, and employee traffic. These flows often reveal conflicts that are not visible from a layout drawing.

Operating volumes should be captured at a level that supports future-site design. Averages are insufficient. The team should capture volume by day, week, month, shift, customer, product family, SKU, process step, dock, storage zone, order type, and service channel where relevant. It should identify peaks, seasonality, promotional surges, month-end patterns, shutdowns, campaign cycles, and unusual demand events. A warehouse designed around average outbound volume may fail during peak. A production line moved based on annual volume may miss the weekly sequencing constraints that determine capacity.

The baseline should also capture variability and mix. Volume alone does not explain operating difficulty. A site that ships 10,000 units of a narrow product range may be simpler than a site that ships 2,000 highly customized orders. The team should understand order profiles, batch sizes, changeover frequency, product dimensions, storage conditions, handling requirements, hazard classifications, temperature controls, customer-specific instructions, and quality hold patterns. These factors influence layout, labor, equipment, systems, and startup risk.

The output of this section should be a current process and flow package. Process inventory: a list of all activities performed at the current site, grouped by function and operating area. Flow maps: practical diagrams or narratives showing how materials, people, information, vehicles, and exceptions move. Volume baseline: historical and forecast operating volumes, with peaks and mix complexity clearly identified. Critical dependencies: processes that depend on shared people, systems, utilities, equipment, approvals, or external parties. This package allows the move team to design for actual work rather than assumed work.

5.2 Documenting Current Layout, Equipment, Utilities, and Constraints

The second layer is the physical and technical assessment. The move team needs to understand the building, equipment, infrastructure, and constraints that support today’s operation. This assessment helps the team decide what must be replicated at the new site, what can be improved, what hidden requirements exist, and what risks may appear during decommissioning or installation.

Current layout documentation should begin with the best available drawings, but it should not end there. Many sites have outdated floor plans, undocumented changes, temporary partitions, revised storage zones, moved equipment, blocked exits, changed offices, or added utility connections that never made it into the drawing set. The team should validate drawings through site walks and measurements. Photographs, annotated floor plans, workstation sketches, dock diagrams, and zone maps can be more useful than perfect architectural drawings if they accurately show how the site operates.

The layout assessment should capture more than where equipment sits. It should document adjacencies, aisle widths, storage density, staging areas, work-in-process locations, inspection zones, maintenance access, emergency routes, pedestrian crossings, forklift paths, visitor entrances, employee entrances, secure spaces, waste accumulation points, cleaning areas, and overflow locations. Informal areas matter. A “temporary” staging zone that has existed for three years is part of the operating model, whether or not it appears on a drawing.

Equipment documentation should identify the major assets that enable the operation. Chapter 7 addresses the full asset and materials inventory in more detail, but the current-site baseline should capture enough information to understand operating dependencies and future-site requirements. The team should document equipment name, location, function, owner, age, condition, dimensions, weight, utility connections, safety requirements, maintenance needs, calibration status, spare parts, software dependencies, vendor support, and move complexity.

Utility documentation is often where hidden move risk emerges. Equipment and processes may depend on power, water, natural gas, compressed air, steam, chilled water, process gases, vacuum, drainage, wastewater treatment, HVAC, exhaust, dust collection, fire protection, lighting, network connectivity, telecom, security systems, and environmental monitoring. The team should capture utility capacity, connection points, actual loads, peak usage, redundancy, shutoff locations, maintenance history, and known reliability issues. A machine that appears easy to move may require power quality, air pressure, ventilation, or drainage that the new site does not yet have.

Constraints should be documented explicitly. Physical constraints: low ceilings, narrow doors, weak floors, column spacing, dock limitations, turning radii, elevator limits, slope, poor visibility, crowded aisles, and lack of expansion space. Operational constraints: shift restrictions, maintenance windows, noise limits, shared spaces, limited supervision, bottleneck processes, and constrained storage. Technical constraints: obsolete equipment, fragile controls, custom wiring, unsupported software, calibration sensitivity, and vendor dependency. Decommissioning constraints: equipment that cannot be stopped without affecting other processes, utilities that serve multiple areas, hazardous residues, specialized cleaning, or landlord restoration requirements.

The assessment should distinguish between current constraints that the new site should not inherit and current requirements that the new site must support. A congested aisle may be a problem to fix, while nearby quality inspection may be a requirement to preserve. A poorly located printer may be a nuisance, while immediate label availability may be operationally critical. The goal is not to copy the current site blindly. The goal is to understand the logic underneath it.

5.3 Capturing Current Certifications, Permits, Licenses, and Compliance Requirements

The third layer of the current-site baseline is the compliance fact base. Every facility operates within a set of approvals, obligations, and controls. Some are obvious: occupancy permits, business licenses, environmental permits, fire inspections, quality certifications, insurance requirements, and regulatory registrations. Others are embedded in customer agreements, product approvals, audit commitments, landlord provisions, local ordinances, security rules, or industry-specific standards. A move can disrupt compliance if these obligations are not identified early.

The team should begin by assembling all current certifications, permits, licenses, registrations, approvals, and inspection records. This may require input from legal, quality, environmental health and safety, facilities, finance, regulatory affairs, security, procurement, real estate, and site leadership. Documents may be stored in different systems or owned by different functions. In some companies, the person who knows the most about a permit is not a lawyer or compliance manager, but a facilities lead who has managed the annual inspection for years.

Compliance requirements should be classified by how they affect the move. Transferable requirements: approvals or certifications that can be updated, amended, or transferred to the new site. New-site requirements: approvals that must be obtained separately before the new site can operate. Closure requirements: obligations required to shut down, exit, restore, or decommission the current site. Continuity requirements: obligations that must remain active during a phased move or duplicate operation. Customer-specific requirements: approvals, audits, or notifications required before certain customers accept production, shipments, services, or documentation from the new site.

For manufacturing and regulated operations, quality and regulatory implications may determine the move sequence. Product approvals may reference a manufacturing site, test method, process, lab, supplier, storage condition, or release procedure. A new location may require qualification, validation, inspection, customer approval, or notification before saleable products can be produced or shipped. Moving a process before the required approval is in place can create inventory that cannot be released, even if the equipment runs correctly.

Environmental, health, and safety obligations also require careful review. The current site may have permits for air emissions, wastewater discharge, hazardous waste storage, flammable materials, chemical use, boilers, pressure vessels, fuel tanks, refrigeration systems, fire protection, emergency response, noise, or stormwater. The move may require closure notifications, waste disposal records, cleaning certificates, removal of regulated materials, or landlord restoration. The team should identify not only what is required to operate the new site, but what is required to leave the old site properly.

Office and headquarters moves have compliance requirements as well, including occupancy approvals, accessibility, employee safety, records retention, information security, privacy controls, visitor management, tax registrations, lease provisions, and insurance updates. A corporate office move can disrupt payroll, legal records, customer data handling, or board documentation if administrative compliance is treated as routine.

The output should be a compliance obligations register. Each item should list the requirement, issuing authority or owner, current status, expiration date, renewal cycle, documents required, move implication, new-site requirement, old-site closure requirement, responsible owner, decision deadline, and evidence needed for readiness. The register should be reviewed at the steering committee when a permit, certification, inspection, or approval affects the critical path.

5.4 Identifying Informal Practices and Tribal Knowledge

The fourth layer of the baseline is the knowledge that rarely appears in official documentation. Informal practices and tribal knowledge are not signs of a poorly run facility. They exist in every operation because people adapt to reality. They know which supplier arrives early, which customer rejects a label if the spacing is wrong, which machine needs attention after a weekend shutdown, which dock is avoided in heavy rain, which inventory should not be stacked despite the system allowing it, and which supervisor can solve a recurring carrier problem quickly.

During a facility move, tribal knowledge becomes fragile. Employees may not relocate. Contractors may not understand local routines. New hires may not yet know exceptions. Current supervisors may be distracted by transition tasks. Written procedures may not contain the details needed to restart smoothly. If informal knowledge is not captured, the new site can suffer from mistakes that experienced employees would have prevented without thinking about them.

The team should identify tribal knowledge through observation and structured conversations. Interviews with leaders are useful, but they are not enough. The best sources are often operators, material handlers, maintenance technicians, quality inspectors, customer service representatives, security guards, receiving clerks, shipping coordinators, administrative assistants, facilities technicians, and long-tenured supervisors. These employees know the exceptions, workarounds, judgment calls, and practical dependencies that keep the site running.

Useful questions are concrete. What do new employees usually get wrong? Which tasks depend on one or two experienced people? Which equipment behaves differently from what the manual says? Which customers have undocumented requirements? Which suppliers or carriers need special handling? Which spaces are used differently during peak periods? Which reports are manually adjusted before decisions are made? Which alarms, inspections, or checks are easy to miss? What would fail first if the most experienced employees were unavailable?

The team should also review artifacts created by the operation itself. Whiteboards, handwritten logs, shared spreadsheets, email templates, carrier notes, customer checklists, maintenance notebooks, shift handover sheets, troubleshooting guides, local signage, and informal dashboards can reveal how work is actually controlled. These artifacts should not be dismissed because they are unofficial. They may be visible evidence of a process gap that must be addressed before the move.

Not all informal practices should be preserved. Some workarounds exist because the current layout is poor, the system is incomplete, equipment is unreliable, or historical habits were never challenged. The assessment should classify informal practices into three groups. Preserve: practices that protect quality, safety, customer service, or productivity and should be built into the future operating model. Replace: practices that are necessary today but should be converted into formal procedures, system rules, training, automation, or layout changes. Eliminate: practices that add risk, waste, confusion, or inconsistency and should not move to the new site.

Capturing tribal knowledge should lead to action. Critical knowledge should be documented in standard work, training material, startup checklists, customer instructions, maintenance plans, system configuration, or visual controls. Key employees should be involved in layout reviews, equipment preparation, move rehearsals, and startup support. Where employees are not moving to the new site, knowledge transfer should begin early and be tracked like any other critical readiness task.

5.5 Current-State Assessment Checklist

The current-state assessment should produce a practical package that leaders can use for design, planning, risk management, and communication. The checklist below can be used by the move leader to structure the assessment and confirm that the major components of the fact base are complete. The checklist should be adapted to the facility type, move scenario, industry, and risk profile.

Current-State Assessment Checklist

• Site overview: Document the facility name, address, ownership or lease status, operating role, affected business units, and expected move scenario.
• Process inventory: List all core, support, administrative, customer-facing, quality, maintenance, safety, and compliance processes performed at the site.
• Process maps: Capture how work is performed today, including official process steps and observed real-world variations.
• Flow maps: Document material, people, information, vehicle, waste, visitor, sample, and exception flows.
• Operating volumes: Capture historical and forecast volumes by product, customer, service type, shift, season, order profile, process step, and peak period.
• Capacity and bottlenecks: Identify current constraints in labor, equipment, docks, storage, utilities, quality release, maintenance, systems, supervision, and space.
• Layout documentation: Validate current drawings, annotate actual use of space, and capture photos or sketches where drawings are incomplete.
• Equipment baseline: Identify major assets, locations, functions, condition, dimensions, utility needs, maintenance requirements, calibration status, and move complexity.
• Utilities baseline: Document power, water, gas, compressed air, HVAC, drainage, fire protection, network, telecom, security, and other required services.
• Constraints register: Capture physical, operational, technical, safety, regulatory, landlord, and decommissioning constraints.
• Compliance obligations: List certifications, permits, licenses, registrations, inspections, customer approvals, lease obligations, and closure requirements.
• Records and documentation: Identify controlled documents, drawings, manuals, quality records, maintenance records, training files, customer files, and retention requirements.
• Informal practices: Capture workarounds, local routines, manual trackers, judgment rules, customer exceptions, supplier habits, and employee know-how.
• Critical knowledge owners: Identify employees who hold specialized knowledge and define knowledge-transfer actions.
• Baseline deliverables: Assemble the process inventory, flow maps, volume baseline, layout package, equipment baseline, utilities baseline, compliance register, constraint register, and tribal knowledge log.
• Open assumptions: List unresolved facts, data gaps, owners, due dates, and implications for future-state design.

The checklist should not become a paperwork exercise. The move leader should use it to drive fieldwork, interviews, document collection, observations, and cross-functional review. Each item should have an owner and a completion standard. For example, “layout documented” should mean the drawing has been validated against the actual facility, not simply that a file exists. “Operating volumes captured” should mean peaks, mix, and variability are understood, not simply that annual volume has been reported.

The current-state baseline should be reviewed with the people who run the site. Supervisors, operators, maintenance technicians, quality personnel, material handlers, office coordinators, and functional leads should be given a chance to challenge the findings. This review surfaces gaps and builds confidence that the move plan is grounded in operational reality.

Once approved, the baseline becomes a reference document for future-state design. The new site assessment can be compared against current requirements. The layout team can distinguish true requirements from legacy constraints. The equipment team can plan decommissioning and installation with better facts. The risk team can identify continuity exposures. HR can understand knowledge-transfer needs. Finance can test cost assumptions. The current site may not be the future, but it is the evidence base from which the future must be built.