Line Balancing
What is Line Balancing?
Line Balancing is leveling of the workload across all operations in a line to remove bottlenecks and excess capacity, defined by Six Sigma Material.
When you consider mass production, garments are produced in lines or set of machines instead of single machine. A line may be assembly line, modular line or section, a line set with online finishing and packing. A line includes multiple work stations with varied work contents. Production per hour is varied depending on work content (standard minutes of particular task/operation), allocation of total manpower to a particular operation, operator skill level and machine capacity. Operation with lowest production per hour is called as bottleneck operation for that line.
A bottleneck operation in a line determines the output of the line. That is why it is very important to increase production of the bottleneck processes or operations.
Line supervisors, work study officers find ways to increase production from the bottleneck operation and implement those means one by one to level work across operations. In layman language, this is called line balancing.
Secondly Line balancing is essential as because, if excess capacity of sewing operators does not utilized production cost will be high and results in waiting and absorption of fixed cost.
Though above definition is widely accepted, I saw few factories where so called Engineers name line balancing to something else. At the time of machine/manpower planning based on work content of each operations, they prepare a sheet where operation wise manpower is calculated. Most of the cases calculated manpower gives fraction of figure but in real you can’t allocate to fraction of manpower to an operation. So manpower planner decides to which operations one machinist, to which operations two machinist or where only single machinist will be allocated for two or three operations. Planner makes this decision based on calculated data.
In the
Line Balancing is leveling of the workload across all operations in a line to remove bottlenecks and excess capacity, defined by Six Sigma Material.
When you consider mass production, garments are produced in lines or set of machines instead of single machine. A line may be assembly line, modular line or section, a line set with online finishing and packing. A line includes multiple work stations with varied work contents. Production per hour is varied depending on work content (standard minutes of particular task/operation), allocation of total manpower to a particular operation, operator skill level and machine capacity. Operation with lowest production per hour is called as bottleneck operation for that line.
A bottleneck operation in a line determines the output of the line. That is why it is very important to increase production of the bottleneck processes or operations.
Line supervisors, work study officers find ways to increase production from the bottleneck operation and implement those means one by one to level work across operations. In layman language, this is called line balancing.
Secondly Line balancing is essential as because, if excess capacity of sewing operators does not utilized production cost will be high and results in waiting and absorption of fixed cost.
Though above definition is widely accepted, I saw few factories where so called Engineers name line balancing to something else. At the time of machine/manpower planning based on work content of each operations, they prepare a sheet where operation wise manpower is calculated. Most of the cases calculated manpower gives fraction of figure but in real you can’t allocate to fraction of manpower to an operation. So manpower planner decides to which operations one machinist, to which operations two machinist or where only single machinist will be allocated for two or three operations. Planner makes this decision based on calculated data.
In the