Absenteeism and turnover as motivation factors for segmenting assembly lines

Many assembly lines for complex products are divided into segments (zones and sections), each with its own manager. While zones are usually large and derived from the nature of the process, the segmentation into smaller sections is less obvious. This paper explores the relationship between the effects of absenteeism and turnover (requiring a slowdown because of the substitute workers' learning period) and the segments length. The paper analyses and discusses the effect of dissecting the assembly line into sections in curbing the slowdowns due to absenteeism and turnover in large assembly lines. Quantitative model is developed to represent this factor, and bounds are found for the sections length. An important implication of dividing several hundred stations into small sections is that each section can be efficiently designed and balanced independently, making the optimization complexity irrelevant.