Assembly Line Balancing Implementation in Manufacturing Industry

A wide range of the real world problems in industries are related to misbalances of the production line. In this paper, there is the demonstration of a practical approach to balance and synchronize a ceiling fan assembly line which is characterized by several manufacturing limitations. The Rank Positional Weight (RPW) which is a heuristic method was used to balance the ceiling fan motor assembly line of Nigerian Engineering Works Port Harcourt for performance improvement. Data collected for this research is based on primary information. This involved assigning the tasks or elements into work stations such that the cycle time was minimized from 0.729min to 0.583min. This in turn minimized the balance delay from 31% to 5% thereby maximizing the line efficiency from 69% to 95%. This increased the possible output of the assembly line from 608 units to 823 units of the assembled ceiling fan motor without additional resources. The study recommends that the company should adopt the new production line design.