Question for Assembly-line Balancing

Q. To make one particular model of a personal digital assistant (PDA) on an assembly line, the work content is defined by the ten tasks below.

1. Draw the precedence diagram for this assembly line.

2. What is the cycle time if you want to produce 4,500 PDAs per workday assuming 7.5 hours per day?

3. What is the theoretical minimum number of workstations to balance this line?

4. Using the largest task time first decision rule with the shortest task time rule being used for breaking ties, balance this assembly line. (Make sure you do not violate precedent relationships and the total work per workstation must be less than or equal to six seconds.)

5. Compute process efficiency and evaluate the resulting balance in part d.

6. Comment on the results

Work Task Time (seconds) Immediate Predecessor(s) 1 3.0 None 2 2.0 None 3 1.5 1,2 4 5.0 3 5 3.5 4. 6 3.0 4 7 2.5 5,6 8 4.0 7 9 2.0 8 10 5.5 9 Total 32.0 seconds