Interactive Excel-Based Procedure for Line Balancing

The assignment of tasks to workstations that results in the assembly of an item or provision of a service is a common topic of discussion in operations management (OM) courses. In this paper, we present an interactive Excel spreadsheet assisted procedure for assigning the required tasks. The procedure actively engages the student in the process and serves as a tool for learning how to effectively and efficiently assign the tasks to a series (line) of connected workstations. The Excel implementation provides more flexibility in selecting tasks than textbook or other Excel based methods that rely on certain priority rules, and is considerably easier to use than math programming models. The procedure and its spreadsheet implementation are illustrated and discussed, with an example.