Manufacturing performance improvement can be achieved in several different ways. On the one hand, the search for high efficiency and maximized utilization in all system resources through balancing the capacity of productive resources, for example, is still a common practice in manufacturing companies. On the other hand, there are companies that adopt flow balancing practices in their production system, which promote high efficiency and utilization only in the restrictive resources of the system, the bottlenecks. Given these possibilities, the main objective of this paper is to evaluate the manufacturing implications and differences between flow balancing and capacity balancing. An analysis identifying the variables that are critical to this managerial decision making process was carried out. A literature review on this topic was conducted, and subsequently, the analysis was performed based on the System Thinking approach. This approach, among other things, allows the identification of effect-cause-effect relationships. The results obtained demonstrated points of convergence and divergence between these two views. It was found that adopting managerial decisions considering flow balancing combined with certain practices of capacity balancing can help increase the company overall gains.
Managerial decision; Manufacturing systems; Flow balancing; Capacity balancing
