Assembly Line Balancing Has Just Been Used to Solve a Product

question 56

Essay

Assembly line balancing has just been used to solve a product layout problem. Two solutions look especially attractive to the plant managers. Both solutions make the same output per day, and both have the same number of workstations. The managers were going to break the tie by looking at line efficiency, but discovered that both lines had the same efficiency as well. Should they have been surprised at this? Explain.

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Definitions:

Risk Adjusted Performance

An evaluation of an investment's return after accounting for the degree of risk that was taken to achieve it.

Portfolio

An assortment of financial assets including stocks, bonds, and commodities, as well as cash and near-cash items like mutual funds and ETFs.

Sharpe Ratio

Reward-to-volatility ratio; ratio of excess return to portfolio standard deviation.

Standard Deviation

Standard Deviation is a measure of the dispersion or variability of a set of data points or investment returns around the mean.