Line Balancing Efficiency
Also known as balance efficiency · assembly line efficiency · balance delay · line efficiency · station idle time · how well is the line balanced
Worked example: 400 s of work, 5 stations, 100 s cycle → 80% efficient — press Try an example to run it live, then adjust anything.
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Line Balancing Efficiency explained
Stations get paid for the whole cycle whether they are working or waiting. Five stations on a 100-second cycle buy 500 station-seconds per unit built; if the work only fills 400 of them, efficiency is 80% and the other 100 seconds are balance delay. That idle time is real money, and on a line running two shifts it is the equivalent of a full-time position.
Efficiency is capped by the longest single task. The cycle time can never be shorter than the biggest indivisible task on the line, so one 95-second operation forces a 95-second cycle even if the average station only holds 60 seconds of work. This is why line balancing so often turns into task splitting: break the bottleneck task in half and the whole line's cycle can drop, lifting efficiency at every station at once.
The number to distrust is a very high one. Efficiency above about 95% usually means the cycle time was fitted to the work rather than to customer demand, which is a line balanced to itself instead of to takt. It will look wonderful on the report and build inventory nobody asked for.
Line Balancing Efficiency formula
- = Balance efficiency
- = Total work content (s)
- = Number of stations (stations)
- = Cycle time (s)
Missing one of these? Work it out first, then come back
- Balance efficiency — Thermal Efficiency, Machine Efficiency
- Total work content — Theoretical Minimum Number of Stations, Reorder Point
- Number of stations — Theoretical Minimum Number of Stations, Economic Order Quantity (Wilson EOQ)
- Cycle time — Theoretical Minimum Number of Stations, Little's Law (Work in Process)