Designing Product

Layouts: Line
Balancing
Prepared by:
Jessie Rey F. Avenido
Line Balancing
• The goal of a product layout is to arrange workers or machines in the
sequence that operations need to be performed.
• Production line or assembly line.
• Because it is difficult and costly to change a product layout that is
inefficient, design is a critical issue.
• Benefits of a product layout relate to the ability to divide required work
into a series of elemental tasks (e.g. “assemble parts C and D”) that
can be performed quickly and routinely by low-skilled workers or
specialized equipment.
• The durations of these elemental tasks typically range from a few
seconds and 15 minutes or more.
Line Balancing (cont’d.)
• The process of deciding how to assign tasks to workstations is
referred to as line balancing.
• The goal is to obtain task groupings that represent approximately
equal time requirements.
• Idle time occurs if task times are not equal among workstations;
some stations are capable of producing at higher rates than
others.
• Unbalance lines are undesirable in terms of inefficient utilization
of labor and equipment and because they may create morale
problems at the slower stations for workers who must work
continuously.
Line Balancing
(cont’d.) • Lines that are perfectly balanced will have a smooth
flow of work as activities along the line are synchronized
to achieve maximum utilization of labor and equipment.
• The major obstacle to attaining a perfectly balanced
line is the difficulty of forming task bundles that have
the same duration.
• The major obstacle to attaining a perfectly balanced
line is the difficulty of forming task bundles that have
the same duration.
• One cause of this is that it may not be feasible to
combine certain activities into the same bundle, either
because of differences in equipment requirements or
because the activities are not compatible (e.g., risk of
contamination of paint from sanding)
• Another cause of difficulty is that differences among
elemental task lengths cannot always be overcome by
grouping tasks.
• A third cause of an inability to perfectly balance is that a
required technological sequence may prohibit
otherwise desirable task combinations.
Line Balancing (cont’d.)
• Line balancing involves assigning tasks to workstations.
• The primary determinant is what the line’s cycle time will be.
• The cycle time is the maximum time allowed at each workstation
to perform assigned tasks before the work moves on.
• The cycle time also establishes the output rate of a line.
• The line’s capacity is a function of its cycle time.
Line Balancing (cont’d.)
• Suppose that the work required to fabricate a certain product can
be divided up into five elemental tasks, with the task times and
precedence relationships, as shown in the following diagram:

• The minimum cycle time is equal to the longest task time (1.0
minute), and the maximum cycle time is equal to the sum of the
task times (0.1 + 0.7 + 1.0 + 0.5 + 0.2 = 2.5 minutes)
• The minimum and maximum cycle times are important because
they establish the potential range of output for the line, which we
can compute using the following formula.
Line Balancing (cont’d.)
• As a general rule, the cycle time is determined by the desired
output; that is, a desired output rate is selected, and the cycle
time is computed.
• If the cycle time does not fall between the maximum and
minimum bounds, the desired output must be revised.
• The cycle time can be computed using this equation.
Line Balancing (cont’d.)
• The number of workstations that will be needed is a function of
both the desired output rate and our ability to combine elemental
tasks into workstations.
• We can determine the theoretical minimum number of stations
necessary to provide a specified rate of output as follows:
Line Balancing (cont’d.)
• A very useful tool in line balancing is a precedence
diagram.
• It visually portrays the tasks to be performed, along
with the sequential requirements – that is, the
order in which tasks must be performed.
• A number of line-balancing heuristics are in use,
two of which are described here for purposes of
illustration:
a. Assign tasks in order of most following tasks.
b. Assign tasks in order of greatest positional
weight. Positional weight is the sum of each
task’s time and the times of all following tasks.
Line Balancing (cont’d.)
Two widely used measures of effectiveness are:
1. The percentage of idle time of the line. This is sometimes
referred to as the balance delay. It can be computed as follows:

2. The efficiency of the line. This is computed as follows:

Some Guidelines for Line Balancing
• In balancing an assembly line, tasks are assigned one at a time to
the line, starting at the first workstation.
• At each step, the unassigned tasks are checked to determine
which are eligible for assignment.
• Next, the eligible tasks are checked to see which of them will fit in
the workstation being loaded.
• A heuristic is used to select one of the tasks that will fit, and task
is assigned.
• The objective is to minimize the idle time for the line subject to
technological and output constraints.
Some Guidelines for
Line Balancing (cont’d.)

• The desired output rate determines the cycle

time, and the sum of the task times assigned
to any workstation must not exceed the cycle
time.
• Following tasks are all tasks that you would
encounter by following all paths from the task
in question through the precedence diagram.
• Precedence tasks are all tasks you would
encounter by tracing all paths backward from
the task in question.
• The positional weight for a task is the sum of
the task times for itself and all its following
tasks.