Balancing an assembly line can speed up production or save money.
Assembly line balancing can be loosely defined as the process of optimizing an assembly line with respect to certain factors. Setting up an assembly line is a complicated process, and optimizing this system is an important part of many manufacturing business models. Maintaining and operating one is also usually quite expensive. The main focus of the balance is usually to optimize existing or planned assembly lines to minimize costs and maximize profits.
Some companies hire outside consultants to balance the assembly line.
For example, an assembler may want to change the layout of his assembly line to speed up production. The company may consider the number of workstations a manufactured item must pass through before completion and the time required at each point. Of course, each stage of this process requires a certain amount of time, and the time allotted to finish a process, the number of workers or the demand for resources can also be considered, depending on the specific manufacturing requirements.
An automobile manufacturer may want to change the layout of its assembly line to speed up production.
Possible outcomes of an assembly line balancing process may be to maximize efficiency, minimize the time to complete a process, or minimize the number of workstations needed within a given time period. Each manufacturing process can be quite different from the other, so a company that balances unique workloads must work within the constraints and limitations that affect its specific assembly line.
A company that balances unique workloads must work within the constraints and constraints that affect its specific assembly line.
To optimize very specific operations, balancing an assembly line may require different methods, some of which include equations and algorithms related to specific aspects of the manufacturing process. Complex manufacturing processes, such as large-volume automobile manufacturing, can be broken down into smaller parts, such as individual task times or resource demands for each machine. This can be especially useful in manufacturing processes that require consideration of many variables, such as custom vehicles. Assembly line balancing can also guide decision making based on the multitude of variables that can affect the manufacturing process.
Individual task times can be measured and play a key role in balancing the assembly line.
Often this process can be used to support decision making by offering different models and types of data. For example, the manager of an automobile manufacturer might analyze his operation based on assembly line equilibrium concepts using many different variables and then make a decision based on that analysis. While this may provide the best answer to an optimization effort based on a set of variables, the final decision may lie in multiple mathematical perspectives of the same problem.