Okuzeka
Industrial Engineering & Manufacturing vocabulary · Production Planning and Control

Line balancing

Meaning in industrial engineering & manufacturing, with examples

nounCommon term

In industrial engineering & manufacturing, line balancing means: Dividing 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.

In Turkish: hat dengeleme, montaj hattı dengeleme

How it is used

Done when a line is designed or demand changes. Engineers balance or rebalance a line, often with a yamazumi chart (a stacked bar chart of work per station). The minimum number of stations is the total work content divided by takt time, rounded up.

Example sentences

  1. After line balancing, we run the same volume with seven operators instead of nine.

  2. We need to do the line balancing again because takt time changes in April.

Common collocations

  • line balancing study
  • rebalance the line
  • yamazumi chart
  • line balancing efficiency
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • assembly lineA 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.
  • bottleneckThe slowest step or resource in a process, which limits the output of the whole system, just as the neck of a bottle limits how fast liquid flows out.
  • cycle timeThe time it takes to complete one unit or one full round of a task at a machine or workstation, from start to finish.

More terms: Production Planning and Control

Practise with graded reading

Reading at the right level is the fastest way to make new words stick. Pick free English books by level: