Line Balancing

In order to withstand cost pressure in manufacturing, measures are necessary to efficiently utilize and operate the lines. Therefore, one goal must be to eliminate conflicts such as bottlenecks or underutilization or waiting times in production. A bottleneck typically occurs at the workstation where the processing of the process steps (the workload) takes the longest. The so-called “Work-In-Progress (WIP) inventory” is created by processing the process steps at this station. It includes all goods that are still in the processing phase. Conversely, at workstations with a lower temporal workload, unused times (idle times) occur, as these workstations always have to wait for further assignment of work by the upstream workstations with longer process times. The idle time is then the time in which a unit is unproductive or unused (but ready for operation). This is exactly where the method of line balancing comes in. The goal of line balancing is to optimize the value chain and eliminate waste.