Assembly Line Productivity Improvement through the Integration of Work Study and Line Balancing (Case of Bishoftu Automotive Engineering Industry)

Assembly lines are one and half-century-old production systems. From its very foundation up to date, it has been smart means of mass production for standardized products. Assembly line balancing is the distribution of tasks evenly over strategic work station to improve system efficiency and maximize production rate by maximizing workload smoothness, and minimizing total work content time, the number of workstations, and idle resources (manpower, machine& equipment). The focus of this study is to maximize production rate and system efficiency in the automotive industry Trim production workshop assembly line by incorporation of work-study and line balancing techniques after analyzing existing performance. Both first-hand and second-hand data sources as well as a mixed research approach were used in the study. Primary data that are qualitative in nature (interview& Questionnaire) were analyzed using IBM SPSS statistics 26. Quantitative data (data obtained by time study/observation) on the other hand, were analyzed by the Ranked Positional weighted (RPW) heuristic method and Work Sharing (WS) method. Secondary data include related literature, compiled company documents, journal articles, books, and the like. The result of the analysis shows that work content per piece is reduced by 65 %, task time by 7 %, labor cost by 28 % these caused the efficiency to increase by 275 %, productivity by 166 %, and net profit by 166 %.