Manyata Sachdev, a recent graduate from a U.S. west coast business school, has worked for Jameson Technology for four years. She had worked in sales and logistics, and now they wanted her to work in production to broaden her company experience. Ms. Sachdev was a high achiever and part of Jameson's young executive development program. She majored in finance with a minor in marketing and a second minor in logistics.

Jameson Technology won a supplier contract to assembly 100,000 electric motor reducers this first year of production. A reducer is like a transmission for internal combustion engines, but for electric vehicles. It transfers the electric motor power to the wheel. The electric motor has a much higher revolutions per minute (RPM) than that of an internal combustion engine. The transmission and the reducer accomplish the same task?they transfer the RPM to the wheel to match the driving circumstances. The factory manager assigned Ms. Sachdev, along with three engineers, to set up an assembly line for manufacturing the reducers.

The assembly team gave Ms. Sachdev two chapters to read and one article to learn the concepts and methods of assembly line balancing. The team decided initially to break the work content down into eight major work activities and times, as shown in Exhibit 8.15.

Exhibit 8.15 Electric Motor Reducer Task Times and Precedence Relationships Work Activity Activity Predecessors Time per Activity (seconds) A 30 B A 80 c B 70 D B 50 E A 70 F C,D 80 G B;E:E 30 Total Time 410 seconds Exhibit 8.16 Revised Electric Motor Reducer Task Times and Precedence Relationships Work Activity Activity Predecessors Time per Activity (seconds) A 20 B 30 C A 35 D A 25 E B 40 F B 30 G C, D 45 H E, F 50 G 20 G, H 55 K H 25 L J, L 35 Total Time 410 seconds