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Line Balancing: What Is It?

Line Balancing is based on the premise that a process is only as fast as its slowest part.   A line balancing chart shows us our process steps in order, with timings (usually as a bar chart).   It then becomes easy to see the processes and how long they take.

In many cases we can combine the faster processes together – reducing queues, wait time, re-work and working towards one-piece-flow, and together they will still be faster than the slowest part and takt time.  Sometimes there is more than one “slowest” part in a process.

To perform line balancing, we take the times for each part of a process and put them in order on a bar chart.  A line is drawn in to show the time of customer demand, or takt time.

We then look at the faster processes and see which ones we might be able to combine, while still keeping them faster than the slowest process.  We can also look at the slower processes, and see where we can split them up, so that if they are performed in parallel (at the same time) it can speed up the overall process.

You can also include the “variation” in your process, with a dotted line or empty bar.  This way you will know the maximum it has been, while keeping in mind the average as well.

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