Improvement of Production Rate by Line Balancing for Small Scale Industry...A Case Study

In this research we aimed to improve a line balancing efficiency of a small scale leather women’s handbag manufacturing industry which was having a very poor line efficiency of 40.5%. So much of wastage of time, manpower and recourses were taking place at the organization. The aim of this thesis report was to improve the line efficiency of the organization by using heuristic methods of line balancing i.e. largest candidate rule, Kilbridge & wester column method and rank positional method then we have done a comparative study in the existing factory with line balancing technologies. First of all we calculated the existing line efficiency of the organization mathematically which was found to be 40.5%. Then we applied largest candidate rule (LCR), Kilbridge and wester column (KWC) and rank positional method (RPW) methods of line balancing in the existing factory to balance the sequence and time duration of work elements. We done mathematical analysis and found that by using largest candidate rule method, line efficiency can be increased to 77.09, Kilbridge & wester column method gives 70.70% line efficiency and rank positional weighted method gives 77.09% line efficiency. It is proposed that we can use the largest candidate rule or rank positional method to increase the line efficiency of the existing organization and thus can improve the productivity.