Line Balancing in assembly line. A case study

One of the more common problems in a manual assembly line is the difficult to balance the operations, dealing with different concerns as the way to distribute operations and to accomplish takt times. The complexity of assembly operations also affects the inequity of the workstations' time and generates non value added activities revealed in the total cycle time. The manufacturing plant of this case study produces bus chassis in a very manual assembly operation, and has two different assembly lines: one for urban chassis production (UC) and the second one for foreign chassis production (FC). The purpose of this research paper is to reorganize the job in the workstation for a better use of headcount looking forward to make a 20% reduction. In order to achieve this paper's main objective, the research team used a Lean Six Sigma approach and DMAIC methodology. The activities completed for this case study generated a new operations balancing proposal reducing and eliminating the non-value added activities using Kaizen. This paper is relevant for operations management professionals since it represents one of the most studied issues in manufacturing assembly lines, and provides an integrated approach combining different tools to solve this problem in a multinational company.