Optimizing denim jacket assembly: Comparative analysis of line balancing techniques for efficiency improvement

Bangladesh is one of the world’s leading garment producers, with the apparel sector contributing over 80% of the country’s total export earnings and around 11% to its GDP. Therefore, guaranteeing competitiveness in the apparel manufacturing sector depends critically on the efficiency of garment production lines. One of Bangladesh's biggest garment companies, XYZ Group, has a denim jacket assembly line whose production efficiency is under improvement. In this company, 27 workstations on the current production line, efficiency is just 51.05%, suggesting unequal allocation of the workload. The objective of this research is to increase the line efficiency through three-line balancing approaches: ranked positional weight (RPW), largest candidate rule (LCR), and computer method of sequencing operations for assembly line (COMSOAL) which were used to redistribute work while preserving precedent requirements in order to solve these inefficiencies. With a balancing delay of 8.4% and a smoothness index of 72.11, COMSOAL achieved the highest efficiency at 91.6%, reducing the number of workstations to 15. Meanwhile, LCR and RPW also improved efficiency to 81.1% and 72.5%, respectively. This study offers a structure for raising denim jacket manufacturing production efficiency and can be modified to various clothing production lines to best use available resources and operational effectiveness.