
Bubbles for production
Inventors of the Year 2021 | Category Design and User Experience
For Industrial and Manufacturing Engineers, mixed production lines mean that line balancing becomes a very complicated challenge. This is because different product variants require different operations to be done on them in the different stations. However, the workload in each station should still be as close as possible to the takt time for every variant. This is especially important for the more common variants in the production mix. Therefore, variant probability should also be considered. A bubble chart allows visualizing two dimensions of the variants - workload and probability – on a single axis per station. This makes it extremely easy to find the issues that are most important to handle.Noga Bar-On, Senior UX Expert at Siemens Digital Industries Software