Line Balancing in Mountain Sandal Production Using the Ranked Positional Weight (RPW) and Largest Candidate Rule (LCR) Methods

Abstract

In small and medium manufacturing, uneven workloads between production stations often slow down the entire process and waste valuable working time. This study addresses that problem at UD XYZ, a mountain sandal manufacturer where the production line was divided into six workstations with highly unbalanced station time, ranging from just 11,03 second to 55,52 seconds. As a result, line efficiency was only 62,17%, meaning nearly 37,83% of available production capacity went unused. Two heuristic line balancing methods, Ranking Positional Weight (RPW) and Largest Candidate Rule (LCR), were used to reassign 18 work elements into a better-organized set of workstations. Both methods successfully reduced the number of workstations from six to five and raised line efficiency to 94,83%, while lowering balance delay from 37,83% to 5,17%. However, RPW produced a smoother workload distribution with a smoothness index of 6,21 seconds, compared to 7,13 seconds for LCR. Making RPW the recommended approach. The new line configuration also increased daily production capacity from 454 to 579 pairs per day