Applied Operations Management - Line Balancing And Facilities Location

This course will first introduce you to line balancing and show you how to minimize idle time and balance bottlenecks in production. You will learn that productivity improvements to any non-bottleneck operation will not improve the productivity of the system. The course will then discuss the heuristics for working out a line balancing problem as well as teach you core line balancing formulas. You will also look into cycle time, which determines the rate of production output.

Next, you will study facility location and layout. Location essentially deals with where you want to place your facilities, while layout deals with how you locate core department within your facility once the location is chosen. You will then study the quantitative factors involved in decisions about location - which include raw material and labor availability - as well as the qualitative factors involved in decisions about location - which includes demand area, transportation, and government policies.

The main objective of line balancing is to eliminate or reduce idle time and balance bottlenecks in operations. This will help keep inventory costs and selling prices low, achieve better quality production planning and higher efficiency, as well as increase net incomes and profits. By the end of this course, you will have gained a strong understanding of this core operations process. So why wait? Start your next learning journey, today.