Lecture 3: Line balancing

Question 1

Describe line balancing

Answer 1

The assignment of work to stations in a line process (producion line) to achieve the desired output rate with the smallest number of stations

Question 2

Describe the 4 steps of line balancing?

Answer 2

1. Separate the work into work elements
2. Salculate the time standard for each element
3. Identify the work elements
4. Match the output rate to the production plan

Question 3

In what contexts can line balancing be applied?

Answer 3

Line balancing applies only to line processes that do assembly work, or to work that can be
bundled in many ways to create the jobs for each workstation in the line

Question 4

Work elements

Answer 4

The smallest units of work that can be performed independently

Question 5

Precedence diagram

Answer 5

A diagram that vizualizes immediate predecessors, which activity that i s dependent upon the other and etc.

Usually a network of dots

Question 6

How do you calculate bottleneck capacity?

Answer 6

Capacities are derived by translating the “Minutes per customer” of each bottleneck activity to “customers per hour”

Ex. If the bottle neck of a process is 15 minutes, then the capacity would be 60 min/15 min= 4 customers/hour.

Question 7

Cycle time. Give one example

Answer 7

The average time between units of output emerginf from the process

Ex. If it takes 2 minutes to make a sandwich and there are 2 people staffing, each serve a customer every two minutes. Then the cycle time would be 1 minute