Line and product based line balancing working in the heat exchanger production line

Line balancing problems cause great losses in continuous manufacturing and labour intensive enterprises recent conditions. The main reason for unbalancing problems describe as too much buffer stocks of semi-finished products, waiting processes for each other, differences of work load density between workers, bottleneck points ans so on. These problems lead to low product quality, to disrupt production plan, longer lenght of term since inefficient working lines occur in the factory which subjects lead to customer dissatisfaction and should bu solved in terms of reputation. In this study, line balancing problem in the production line is dealt with where the heat exchangers are produced. By observing the production line for a long time, scenarios were created for line balance and layout plans and production was arranged to ensure optimum improvement. For the line balancing Arena simülation software was used. By the created scenario current and future status were supported. As a result of the study, the target was achieved by making an average of 44,7% improvement in cycle times in three production lines. An average increase of 47% was achieved in the number of product and also more effective lines were obtained by increasing the capacity of the production line and shortening the setup times Key Words: Line balancing, heat exchanger, efficiency, lean manufacturing