A study of the effect of time variations for assembly line balancing in the clothing industry

The problem of assembly line balancing is to assign different tasks to individual workstations for ensuring the sum of task times at any station not exceeding the station time. Standard minute time is generally used in the clothing industry as a predictor of sewing speed and production efficiency. In the clothing industry, the standard minute time derived from the work study methods is generally assumed as a constant for line balancing. However, a lot of factors cause variations on operational time of the same task such as the fabrics and sub‐materials, performance of the machinery, working environment and quality level of the product. With the aid of an illustrating example selected from a men’s shirt manufacturing factory, the effect of time variations for assembly line balancing has been studied in this paper.