Lean Six Sigma organizations can streamline their operations to be more efficient and/or effective using lean manufacturing techniques. Lean focuses on minimizing batch size, work-in-process inventory, lead time, and bottlenecks. It utilizes pull scheduling systems to dictate the flow of products and services.

Line Balancing, also known as heijunka in Japanese, is a lean tool that helps with several of these issues at once by reorganizing operations and resources to match the Takt time established by the customer.

You are working on an improvement project where there are three problems: the total cycle time (TCT) per unit is higher than the Takt time for some of the operations, there is some non-utilized resources waste visible at some of the production stations (station downtime), and there is transportation waste visible with people moving parts back and forth all over the place from station to station for the next operation. You will use line balancing to tackle all three of these problems.

Before you begin, be sure to review the following resources:

Line Balancing
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