Line balancing is one of the very important tools of lean manufacturing to improve operational performance and productivity. Bottleneck analysis, kaizen, 6 ‘s’ methodology, and work-study helps a lot to improve operational line performance. Before improving any process or line, a basic level of data collection is required for analysis purposes.
In this article, we try to understand line balancing, balance delay, and how bottleneck analysis helps to improve the performance of production or assembly lines. The concept of line balancing is helped a lot to minimizing the throughput time of a lines and it can be applied in the manual as well as semi-automatic and automatic activities.
Content
• How to calculate line efficiency?
• How to calculate balance delay?
• Practical examples of line balancing.
What is line efficiency?
Line efficiency is ure of the performance line and correlation of each workstation within the line. A cycle time gap of each workstation is very important because it decides the performance of the line. To improve line efficiency, identifying bottleneck operations and systematic efforts to minimize bottleneck is very essential. Now we understand what is a formula for calculating line efficiency.
What is balance delay?
Balance delay is the measure performance of each workstation and provide detail for how much delay within operational or production line in terms of percentage. It is very essential to measure because minimize balance delay improve the performance of line. In short you observe the gap between highest cycle time and lowest cycle time. To improve line performance, minimize the highest and lowest gap of workstation cycle time. Review attached formula for calculating balance delay of line.
Now you got a very clear idea about line efficiency and balance delay. Let’s understand the calculation of line efficiency and balance delay with the help of practical examples. Review below-attached situation for a particular line having 4 workstations and each workstation having a different cycle or processing time.
A practical example of line balancing.
Line efficiency
= Tp / (CTmax * n)
Tp = Total processing time = 12 + 15 + 9 + 18 = 54 Sec.
CTmax = Maximum cycle time of each workstation = 18 Sec,
n = no of workstation = 4.
Line efficiency = 54 / (18*4) = 0.7500 = 75 %.
Balance Delay
= (CTmax * n) – Tp / (CTmax * n)
= ((18 * 4) – 54) / (18 * 4)
= 0.2752 = 27.52 %.
In a very simple way, you can also calculate balance delay (1–line efficiency). To improve performance of the fine balance of each workstation cycle time is very important. This calculation is also very helpful during one-piece flow implementation.
Thank you for your article.
We have some question about machine line process such as SMT process (Surface Mount Technology) have many machine in line process.
How to calculate line efficiency and balance delay?
What we focus for machine in process?
can you send to me for my email.
there must be something wrong in your calculation. If the line efficiency is 0.75, the balance delay is = 1-0.75 = 0.25. and this is correct according to the formula shown in the definition. Instead, the balance delay calculated is wrong, it cannot be equal to 0.2752.