Lean tool - Balance workload

Balancing the workload is a crucial step of any Lean implementation, in order to create a continuous flow in the process.

You can visualize the differences in cycle times on the different stations using a bar chart.

The objective should be for each station with a cycle time equal or below the Takt time. The Takt time corresponds to the minimum pace the plant should be delivering products to fulfill customer orders. For example if we need to deliver a total of 40 units in 6 minutes, the takt time is 9s (6*60 / 40).

In the example below, it is clear that the Grey station is the bottleneck in the process.

In order to balance the charge, you can distribute the operation types between the different stations, to avoid bottlenecks, so that each player needs to click the same number of times for each product.

You could for example help the Grey by externalizing the Grey Circles on another station (for example Blue that doesn't have a lot of work).

If you have already unlocked the Jidoka improvement, the Quality & Rework station can now help finalize the squares, because there are many of these to be done.

Here is our proposition implemented (each player should click 2-3 times per product):

See below a balance chart where the work is better distributed: