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Industrial Engineering & Manufacturing vocabulary · Shop Floor and Maintenance

Assembly line

Meaning in industrial engineering & manufacturing, with examples

nounCore term

In industrial engineering & manufacturing, assembly line means: A production line where parts are added to a product step by step, with each worker or robot doing one fixed task, as in car and appliance plants.

In Turkish: montaj hattı

How it is used

Used for any line where things are put together rather than shaped or machined. Henry Ford's moving assembly line of 1913 is the classic example. People work on the assembly line, and a stopped line is very expensive, so problems are escalated quickly.

Example sentences

  1. She started on the assembly line and is now a team leader on the night shift.

  2. Each station on the assembly line has 58 seconds to finish its tasks.

Common collocations

  • work on the assembly line
  • moving assembly line
  • final assembly line
  • stop the assembly line
  • production lineA set of machines and workstations arranged in order, where a product moves from one step to the next until it is finished.
  • takt timeThe pace at which you must finish one product to meet customer demand: the available working time divided by the number of units the customer needs.
  • line balancingDividing the tasks on a production line among the workstations so that each station has about the same amount of work and none is over takt time.
  • workstationOne place on a line or in a work area where a worker or machine carries out a set group of tasks, with the tools and parts needed for them.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Shop Floor and Maintenance

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