This book covers the area of unpaced and unbalanced production lines.You will fi nd an up-to-date discussion of how designing these lines canbe made more effi cient by taking advantage of inherent imbalance—forexample, operators who work at different speeds—a concept that has traditionallybeen seen as an obstacle to effi cient production. A series ofexperiments are presented to illustrate the issues involved in improvingperformance through production line imbalance. This area is of interestto postgraduate and executive-level students interested in the area of productionand to managers of manual or semiautomated production lineswho are interested in innovative approaches to line design. In this bookyou will fi nd some surprisingly easy ways to improve performance withlow or zero costs. Emphasis is placed on reducing the amount of timeproduction lines lie idle and on reducing work in process. This is a timelycontribution to the fi eld when managers are casting around for new waysto cut waste and reduce their use of natural resources.