Lines of Balance - Part 1 of 2

In this podcast, Ricardo begins to explain what Line of Balance are and how can they be used. He gives an example of how to plan repetitive tasks in order to achieve optimal resources allocation and also know how the project's speed and progress evolve. Next week, he will bring an example related to elections.

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Episode transcript

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Hello everybody welcome to the five minutes BM Podcast Today. I like to discuss with you the concept behind Line of Balance line of balance is a very common concept in the engineering works. And it's very, very useful. I decided to record this podcast because I feel one blog from a colleague in Brazil called Rodolphe stoner. He explained about the use of Line of balancing a construction project, and they want to make a very simple example to explain it.

You, the use of line of Balance the first thing you need to understand that Line of Balance is used for repetitious work We relationship. So imagined that you have a project where a set up for it. What is one activities or more of them in one they repeat overtime. So let's propose that you need to build a wall and paint a wall. Then you need to build a set up tomorrow and paint the second wall and let him, and that those walls are equal.

So you need to build hundred walls and paint a hundred walls. And this is your project. Okay? Remember, you're project is unique, but it may contain repetitive work. Of course. Sure. The best way to explain the concept of Line of balance is true. And an example. So let's suppose that you need to build a neighborhood of a hundred houses. All houses will be exactly the same and you have only two tasks to do in each house.

The first one is to the world, the wooden house two, do that. You will use a team of carpenters. The second task is just to paint the houses. So you build the house, you paint the house, then you build an X one, you paint an X one, and you do this. So just to be very, very simple, I'm just creating to single tasks. And lets suppose that based on the side thirty's basis on the productivity, an imagined that you have that a linear productivity that every week the carpenters can Butte tree houses, but the painters are a little bit faster.

They can paint four houses every week. So in magic, if you have tree houses per week and a carpenter and lets suppose that the painter's were also pre everything is fine. Write, you just need to delay it a little bit. They start of the painters and they will not never cross because they are productivity is pretty much the same enough. Of course, this too tasks. They have a very strong relationship. It's impossible to paint a house that doesn't exist, but when the painter's are faster or you may have a problem.

So imagine a graphic where you put time, okay, time on the X and Y houses on the Y axis. Then you draw a line. So how do you see? So the Line of the construction is something like zero three, six, nine, 12, 15, 1821, right? So three new houses per week. If you see the line of the painters, it's not three per week, but four.

So it's zero four, eight, 12. But because you know that you sided to delay the painters two weeks. So will you be starting the construction? So the year, one of the second week we have six houses built. Then you start painting, okay? Because you know that the painter's are faster. So at least they have six houses just to start painting. If you think a little bit more where you will see that this does not solve the problem, because at the end of week nine, you are in trouble.

Why? So let's do a basic calculation here. At the end of week nine, we have 27 houses, but even waiting two weeks at the end of week nine, we are seven weeks of painters each week. We four houses, seven times for 28. So what will happen? Painters will be evil because they don't have any house to paint because the constructors, the carpenters didn't finish the houses.

So the concept of the Line of Balance is to draw this to Lines and see if they cross and try to keep them as close as possible and as parallel as possible, this is very, very important. So what you can do to solve this problem first, you can increase the number of carpenters in order to produce more homes. Second, maybe you can reduce the number of painters because maybe having less benders, they can build out in three per week.

And then, and it's okay. Or the third just delay the start of the painters just to avoid this kind of interruption, because they don't have supplies to do their work Next week. I want to continue to talk about the Line of balance, but I want to give you a different example. Not related to engineering, I will be talking about elections and how we can count and review the volts using the same concept. So imagine that your project is to calculate the final results of an election and you need to count the votes.

So how are you can do that? But this was a topic for Next week in another five minutes PM. Podcast.

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