What is Line Balancing?

Meeting customer needs in a timely manner and fully meeting expectations has led to the need for enterprises to continuously improve their production processes. Considering today's competitive conditions, in addition to the quality factor, the production stages of the product such as flexibility in production processes and production speed have also gained importance for enterprises. Because customers are not only looking for the quality factor in the product they demand. Other factors other than the structure of the product, such as low costs and delivery time, flexibility in production, have also gained importance for customers. This situation has enabled businesses to improve their services throughout the entire supply chain, starting from production.

In the production process, it has been understood that faster and cheaper production can be achieved by dividing the product to be produced into more than one work item and performing the operations of these work items by separate workers.

As a result of the movement and time studies first conducted in 1913, the production line of about 50 meters was divided among 140 workers and the chassis to be assembled was started with the help of a rope pulling at certain intervals on the wheels. And so on;

The 12 hours and 28 minutes required for the assembly of the chassis was reduced to 5 hours and 50 minutes.

In 1914, this time was reduced to 1 hour and 30 minutes by using a mechanical line.

When the line of the product to be assembled is designed, the problem of balancing the time differences between the operations of the product arises. The event of assigning the work to be done during the formation of the product to the assembly stations in a way that minimizes the lost time is called "Assembly Line Balancing". (Tanyaş and Baskak, 2003). The most important factor in assembly line balancing is to minimize the number of workstations with the same processing time or cycle time on the line. This problem is called assembly line balancing problem in the literature (Kılınçcı, 2004).

Objectives of Assembly Line Balancing

To ensure an orderly machine flow.
To maximize the efficiency to be obtained from the use of manpower.
To make maximum use of machine capacity.
Reducing process times.
Minimizing idle times, waiting times.
Minimizing the amount of material usage.
Reducing the number of workstations.
Utilizing all existing constraints in the most efficient way without pushing the limits.
To minimize the cost of line balancing.

In automatic lines, product transfer between stations is also done automatically with operator notification. It is informed whether the station before or after it has finished its operations by means of sensors.

How will the process of measuring these times be done in order to balance the time differences between the operations to be performed, which is the basis for line balancing?

MES , (Manufacturing Execution System) comes into play here. It performs one of the four basic functions of MES with Instant Data Collection from the Production Area (Other functions 2. Stores this data 3. Reports this data to engineering and planning offices together with other critical data 4. Transfers ERP work orders to production units).

MES records the operator's data such as "My operation is over, I am waiting for the next station, I am waiting for the previous station" together with their durations. Thus, it directs how much time a station spends on a product in reality, in which operations in my line I can make improvements, load sharing and line balancing.