Line balancing is the art of distributing work across stations so each takes about the same time - and ideally, all take less than takt. Without it you get bottlenecks and starved stations.
The visual test
Draw a bar chart of cycle time per station. If it looks like a mountain range - some tall, some short - your line is unbalanced. If it looks like a flat plateau below the takt-time line, it's balanced.
How to rebalance
- Move small tasks from bottleneck stations to under-loaded ones next to them.
- Combine stations if two adjacent ones are both under-loaded.
- Split a bottleneck station across two operators or two workstations.
- Change the sequence so upstream stations feed downstream ones at the right pace.
In MapVS
Open the Line Balance chart from the analytics tab. Each stage is a bar, coloured red if it exceeds takt. Drag tasks between stages to rebalance and watch the chart update live.