Line Balancing

Here we are trying to understand the load on an assembly line. Consider the following situation. Leonard, Howard and Sheldon are working on a secret government project. There are 3 activities that need to be performed in a sequence. Total Demand is 125 units per week, and the process operates 35 hours per week. Howard takes 11 minutes per unit and then passes it to Leonard for further processing. Leonard takes 13 minutes per unit and then passes it to Sheldon who takes 8 minutes per unit. So the capacity of Howard, Leonard and Sheldon are 5.45, 4.61 and 7.5 units per hour, respectively. The total process capacity is equal to the lowest individual capacity which here is 4.61 units per hour. If the demand is 125 units, the minimum required flow rate is 3.57 units per hour. The cycle time required is 16.8 minutes per unit. Idle time for Howard here is 5.8 minutes per unit. Leonard 3.8 minutes per unit and Sheldon 8.8 minutes per unit. Capacity utilisation for each of them is 65.5%, 77.4% and 47.6% respectively. Average labour utilisation in the entire process is 63.5 %. Now, If the Demand increases to 200 units/ week the new required cycle time would be 10.5 minutes per unit. Here, Bottleneck is at Leonard, who is utilized 100% and produces once every 13 minutes which will give us the output of 161.5 units/ week. NOW Howard’s utilization is 84.6%. Sheldon’s utilization is 61.5%. And the Overall utilization is 82%. Now looking at the utilization of Leonard, Howard and Sheldon, we can shift certain activities from one person to another to have optimum utilization of the entire process.