Question

Process Selection and Facility Layout

What happens when an Assembly Line is unbalanced?

What is a major disadvantage for using a process type layout?

What is the definition of ‘takt time’?

Answer 1

Process Selection and Facility Layout

Process selection is deals with the way an organization or a company chooses to produce its goods and services. This selection depends on 4 important implications that are, layout facilities, equipment, design of work system and capacity planning.  

Facility layout is an arrangement of utilities available in an organization such as work centers and the configuration of different departments with the particular movement of work. The decision for facility layout is mainly taken when an organization decides to alter the existing facilities and when building a new facility layout.

What happens when an Assembly line is unbalanced

A balanced assembly line breaks the whole production into different pre-defined steps in order to make the manufacturing process easier and systematic way. So let's see, what happens when an assembly line is unbalanced?

# Collapse the workload balance in different assembly work station

When the assembly line is poorly balanced, some work stations are becoming over-utilized or under-utilized. In this situation, the manufacturing process will get stuck in one single step.  

#Low production quality

An unbalanced assembly line is not ensuring the right tool in the right place, which leads to the production of lesser quality products due to the lack of appropriate tools.

#Leads to late product launch

Poor time management in assembly line comparatively takes more time to deliver the finished good, that is negatively affecting product launch in time.

#Lengthy Change over time

Disadvantages of process type layout

#Highly skilled machine operators required

#Increasing the workload in work-in-progress inventory

#it requires highly expensive machine equipments.

#Higher production gap

#Increasing the cost of supervision

What is takt time

Takt time can be defined as the maximum time to produce a product, in order to mee the customer demand.