Understanding of Line Balancing for Material Handling in Management from MBA Books

What do you understand by line balancing? What is the importance of order picking in material handling? Give suitable examples.

Answer - Production lines have a number of work centers in a particular sequence so that the material that gets proceed has to move further without encountering any bottlenecks. The quantities produced the rate of production at each center, the number of operations and the total production required are factors taken into account.

The purpose of taking place between work centers and minimum inventory gets created. We use the principles of JIT and lean Manufacturing to achieve these. Linear programming, Dynamic programming and other mathematical models are used to study these problems.

In order picking important pants are:

Order picking is a process by which items of products for supply is to be made haves to be retrieved from specific storage location. It is found to take 60% of labour activities in the warehouse. Since it is critical to the business to meet customer's demand expeditiously and accurately, lot of attention is being given to this aspect of operations. In the manufacturing arena, we desire to move towards small lot sizes and cycle time reductions.

Efficient order picking is necessary for being competitive. In the supply chain Storage, retrieval and delivery do not add value to the product, but are necessary.

Material Handling:

The purpose is to take the job through the technological steps in which the processing needs to be done for the transformation that is to be effected on the material that is getting processed. The major concerns are about the quantities that need to be processed and the time that the different operations required. In case the product has to enter assembly, along with other parts that are being manufactured parallel, will all the required parts arrive at that point at the same time. Some components may be outsourced. To handle different parts, we have material handling equipments such as cranes lifting forks, trucks etc.

The problem for the manager is the limited supply of these equipments and the need to optimize utilization of the equipment and see that the manufacturing line has smooth flow. Our concern is to reduced inventory, minimums movement and timely availability.

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